Around MIT, Jerome Lemelson is a hallowed name. The late inventor's 500- plus patents (more than any other individual save Thomas Edison) earned him enough to endow the Institute's $500,000 Lemelson Prize for technological innovation. But to Seth Shulman, a journalist who is a frequent contributor to TR and a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Lemelson's success epitomizes a growing scandal in the United States: the privatization of the "conceptual commons. "

Shulman writes that Lemelson was often the first to file for a patent on ideas circulating in the intellectual air, such as combining videotape and the TV camera in the hand-held camcorder. Even if he never built a working model or his patent was issued belatedly, the priority of his claim allowed him to hold whole industries hostage, Shulman argues. "Lemelson's technique -one he repeated throughout his career -was to demand royalties from the companies with existing products that could be construed as infringing his broad claims."