I’m delighted to report that Prof. Adam Mossoff (George Mason University School of Law) will be guest-blogging this week about sewing machines. You might think that an odd topic for this blog, but I much enjoyed reading Prof. Mossoff’s article about the history of sewing machines, the patent law fracas that erupted over them in the mid-1800s (A Stitch in Time: The Rise and Fall of the Sewing Machine Patent Thicket), and the possible implications of this history for the current debate about what patent law should do about “patent thickets.” I think many of you would likewise be interested both in Prof. Mossoff’s piece and in the commentary that he’ll provide in his posts this week. Here’s a summary of the article:
The invention of the sewing machine in the antebellum era was an achievement on par with the latest high-tech or pharmaceutical discovery today. This paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study by a legal scholar of the invention, patenting and commercialization of the sewing machine in the nineteenth century.
In so doing, it challenges many assumptions by courts and scholars today about the alleged efficiency-choking complexities of the modern patent system, revealing that complementary inventions, extensive patent litigation, so-called