12
Jul
2017

Patent Case Files From the Archives: New England Edition

This fall, I recommended that the Boston Public Library look into scanning the case files (pleadings, evidence, etc) of major case files in copyright law held by the National Archives location for New England, located in Waltham, MA.  In collaboration with the Internet Archive they did so, and I highlighted these results in a series of blog posts.

In response to the success of this project I sent the BPL and Archives a list of 19th century patent cases from New England, and they’ve scanned the case files for these as well.  The length of these files varies dramatically – some are a few dozen pages long, some are hundreds of pages long. The link on the case name goes to the case file, while the link of the citation goes to the reported decision.  It’s really cool to see these case files, both to see how patent litigation was conducted in the nineteenth century, and to see how famous early patent cases came to be decided.

Leave a Reply