Tra anticipazione della tecnica e ritardo del diritto. Gli spazi dell’invenzione nella ‘età del progresso’

Law has always regulated technology, while simultaneously regulating itself through it, but these co-implications have surfaced clearly in the contemporary age, coinciding with the parable of the ‘myth of progress’. With a historical approach that views technology as the system structuring modernity and as a ‘provocation’ of law, ‘invention’ has been adopted as an investigative device, throughout this parable. Industrial invention, in fact, fits perfectly into the temporal and dynamic gap between technical development and law, both as the protagonist of progress (and of its narrative) and a problematic object of ‘special’ law, that is patent law. Taking into consideration some of patent law’s issues from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, this study aims to highlight the asynchrony between technical acceleration and regulatory viscosity, as well as potential analogies relating the innovative processes that have affected the field of technology and that of law. Between tradition and innovation, legal scholarship and case law run a laboratory where models and tools are blended and hybridized, new doctrinal and interpretative responses are experimented, organizing the data of reality, which is profoundly transformed by the development of technology and its aftermaths.