Ownership and the History of American Computing

Questions about ownership permeate the history of computing. Some of their most common manifestations involve the ownership of individual machines, from mainframe leases to personal computer purchases. Some of their most unusual manifestations involve national debates on the scope of intellectual property (IP) rights. Connecting these questions are stories about the uses and limits of IP that highlight the importance of three forms of protection. First, patents grant a temporary monopoly over an invention in exchange for public disclosure. Second, copyrights protect creative works such as books and sound recordings. Third, trade secrets allow corporations a certain degree of secrecy in the way they treat their knowledge and undeveloped technologies. The study of ownership presents a rich historiographic opportunity to analyze the interplay between IP and technology development. Although historians of computing have acknowledged the importance of this area by writing about topics such as software patents, the broader history of ownership and computing has been generally overlooked. This Think Piece examines how historians of computing can benefit from works produced by legal scholars and draw methodological guidance from scholarship on the history of ownership. I focus on the period between the 1940s and 1980s, during which the legal frameworks for the ownership of machines and programs that we know today began to develop.