ON 28 JANUARY 1958, a tiny company from a tiny country applied for a patent over a tiny plastic brick. The Lego brick, that tiny block of plastic, has been produced in the tens of billions by the Lego factories since that time. It has been the basis of business school case studies, academic colloquia, and any number of breathless encomia. And it has also been stepped on by countless parents.

The humble brick is, however, much more than just a branded, colored, molded and heat-treated piece of polymer—it is the foundation of a system of control and ownership based on global intellectual property laws. In the early life of the brick, Lego had complete control over its system; but as the patents on the Lego brick began to expire in the mid-1970s, the company had to change its approach. In time it would understand that the thing that mattered was no longer patent but trademark law; and no longer the brick, but the brand.

Beyond this story of corporate evolution, Lego also helps us understand a remarkable legal transformation, that of the global spread of intellectual property laws in the postwar era. The Lego brick has been produced since the mid-1950s, and in its basic form is largely unchanged to this day. In that time, the global intellectual property system has changed from a narrow set of laws that accounted for a tiny percentage of global trade, to one of the foundations of contemporary capitalism. The Lego company and its bricks have been involved in every part ofthat transformation.

The standard creation story of Lego and the brick begins in 1916 with a master carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, who bought a woodworking shop in rural Billund, Denmark. Over time he came to specialize in wooden toys; and so, in 1934, he named his company “Lego,” a contraction of the Danish leg godt, or “play well.” For more than a decade Lego produced nothing but wooden toys, such as carved wooden cars, trucks, and pull-along ducks.

Lego's first brick-based toy was a knockoff of an earlier System from Kiddicraft, an English toy company created by child psychologist Hilary Page. Lego's 1949 version was made, like Kiddicraft's, from cellulose acetate.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (OR “IP”) law is the set of laws that primarily encompasses copyright, patent, and trademark law. It also includes trade secrets and publicity rights. It is one of the most important structuring systems in modern society, as it underpins vast industries such as aerospace, architecture, pharmaceutics, media, and entertainment. It is the locus of concerns about counterfeiting and piracy, it grounds arguments about trade, export, and competition, and it is at the core of discussions over knowledge-based economies, and policies relating to creativity and innovation.

IP laws are all about us, but go mostly unrecognized. They are complicated and arcane, and few people understand why they should care about, for example, copyright law, the grant of a patent, or the registration of a trademark. The IP system didn't exist in its modern form until the 18th century, and as recently as 1945, it was only important to a tiny group of people—newspaper proprietors, film studios, engineering firms, and toothpaste companies. Nowadays, the IP System profoundly affects global trade, and enables trillions of dollars of commerce. These laws define the modern era; without them we wouldn't have famous brands like Coca-Cola or Sony, the internet would not exist, and we wouldn't have an iPhone in our pocket.

50 OBJECTS

In this book, we have brought together a group of contributors who have been drawn not only from law and history, but also from sociology, media studies, horticulture, science and technology studies, among others, while spanning a wide geographical range. In their chapters, they address the different IP regimes to tell a history of IP in 50 objects.

These objects demonstrate the importance of the IP System. They invite questions about various aspects of its multifaceted development. The objects show us how IP has developed and worked within human history, and show its influence on a ränge of historical events, developments, and movements. And perhaps most importantly, they are at the core of some great stories.

THE BARBIE DOLL is a remarkable object— wasp-waisted, flesh-toned, the Venus of Hawthorne, CA, Mattel Inc.'s birthplace. But she is also a lesson in how copyright, trademark, patent can be used by companies to maintain desire. And just as Barbie is the very embodiment of unrequited desire, so too do intellectual property laws constrain consumers in their access to the objects of their lust. Barbie is, then, much more than a doll—she is an object lesson in the connection between lust, laws, money, and flesh-toned plastic.

Born on 9 March 1959, Barbie sprang forth from the imagination of Ruth Handler, one of the founders of the Mattel company and the mother of two children who were, improbably, also named Barbara and Ken. The official Mattel narrative holds that Barbie Millicent Roberts is a wholesome Midwestern gal, a “teenage fashion model” from Willows, Wisconsin. But the creation story of Barbie is more inflected than this, and less wholesome. Barbie was patterned on another doll, “Lilli,” which Ruth Handler chanced upon while on a European tour with her family. Spied in a toy store window in Lucerne, Switzerland, the dollwhich- would-become-Barbie was anything but a sweet teenage fashionista: she was the embodiment of a lewd cartoon character, created by Reinhard Beuthien for a tabloid German newspaper, Bild-Leitung. The character Lilli was an under-employed secretary who hooked on the side, or at least spent a great deal of time “socializing” with rich sugar daddies to supplement her income—a stereotype distressingly familiar in postwar Europe.

The Lilli dolls, developed by O&M Hausser, were released in 1955 and featured Lilli in various outfits, many of them racy. The dolls weren't intended for children, and were apparently bought by men as gag gifts for bachelor parties, as dashboard adornments, or as suggestive gifts for their girlfriends and mistresses.

On hearing that Lilli was a working girl, some commentators have tut-tutted at the sinful nature of Barbie's birth. But the sin emanated not from the doll, but from her creator. Mattel took the Lilli doll and knocked her off as the Barbie doll, with at best a slight cosmetic alteration: her hairline was adjusted to have a less pronounced widow's peak, and her eyebrows became less severely arched. Apart from these minor changes, the dolls were identical, even down to the sideways-glancing eyes on both dolls.