Patents and Exhibitions

In this article I suggest that a forgotten value of the patent law system is freedom of expression. Vestiges can be found in the law's allowance for exhibition of unpatented inventions under provisions whose history can be traced back to the great exhibitions of the nineteenth century. The provisions' initial purpose may have been to preserve an inventor's ability to patent an invention at a time when exhibition was the dominant norm and patenting relatively limited. But, for various reasons to be explored in the article, patenting has now emerged as the dominant norm. When it comes to reform of patent law, if anything, I argue, the law could expand the freedom to exhibit. There may be some net benefits to be obtained in terms of supporting and driving innovation. However, the benefit most especially associated with exhibitions lies in the collective enjoyment of the spectacle—as flourished in the medieval markets and fairs long before the patent system emerged as a mechanism to permit and regulate monopolies, found a measure of official support in the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century museums, galleries and exhibitions, and is now being rediscovered again in certain newer forms of public display of the twenty‐first century.