Rejected patents in the late nineteenth century: copies, discrimination, or too wild ideas? The case of Finland, 1864-1904

Matti La Mela, Uppsala University

Rejected patents in the late nineteenth century: copies, discrimination, or too wild ideas? The case of Finland, 1864-1904 The paper studies the internationalization of patenting and discrimination of foreign applicants through a little-exploited source, rejected patent applications. In the late nineteenth century, patenting and circulation of new technology intensified globally, and national patent systems were modernized to protect the interests of inventors, companies, and states home and abroad. Despite international harmonization, the patent laws and application processes different between the countries. This regarded also the ways in which the patent applications were examined and approved by the national patent officials. The article employs a novel dataset of patent applications from 1864-1904 that were rejected in the Grand Duchy of Finland, a country at the northern European periphery and then part of the Russian Empire. The article studies what kind of inventions were rejected and on what grounds, and to what extent the officials used the rejections to limit the patent rights of foreign applicants, which could be harmful for the nascent domestic industries. The paper discusses the patent examination in different patent systems internationally and focuses on the Finnish case as part of the international system. In the period, most patent applications in Finland were filed from abroad, most commonly from the Scandinavian countries and Germany. Finland introduced a de-facto patent examination in the 1870s and followed the Swedish and German models in its 1898 patent law. The paper has two key contributions. First, it shows how the data about rejected patents provide a more complete picture of innovative activity and international dynamics in patenting. Second, it sheds new light on the evolving patent administrations and the role of the patent institution for national industrial policy.

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 Presented in Session 184. Innovation and Disruption: Beyond Creative Destruction