Cat Ladies, Quilters, and Creativity

• Author: Kara Swanson
• Position: Kara W. Swanson is a professor of law at Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. She teaches intellectual property and property, and her scholarship focuses on the intersection among law, science, medicine and technology, reproduction and the body, and gender and sexuality. She can be reached at k.swanson@northeastern.edu.
• Pages: 49-51

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 10, Number 4, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association.

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An ardent cat lover observes what she suspects is an immunodeciency in stray

cats, and records detailed observations in support of her hypothesis, later proven

by a virologist working in a school of veterinary medicine. When the cat lover is

left out of the resulting patents, she sues, unsuccessfully.1 A quilter laments the

loss of a “culture of quilting” based on sharing, cooperation, and admiring imi-

tation as the assertion of copyright claims warns against passing patterns to a

friend or rafing a quilt made from a copyrighted pattern.2 Each of these women is object-

ing to the subject matter of intellectual property, as the law conicts with her understanding

of creativity and innovation. Although both the Patent Act and the Copyright Act are

facially gender neutral, these examples demonstrate how the legal denitions of “author”

and “inventor” and the “works” and “inventions” they create reinforce persistent gender

disparities in patents and copyright registrations.

Image: iStockphoto