Hi. I was going to submit this for the upcoming Elmira Conference

(Held on my birthday weekend!
http://www.elmira.edu/academics/distinctive_programs/twain_center/confer
ence ) ,

....but given some recent long- and short- term projects coming down the
pike here at work, I can't see any route to me doing justice to this
topic, or anything like a tenth of it, this year.

So, FYI - let me know what you think, and if you are aware of any
studies that I ought to look at. Maybe next year! ;-)

/DDD

Mark Twain at play in the fields of Intellectual Property: seeking a
coherent approach to his entrepreneurial imagination

Sam Clemens worked- or at least dabbled - in nearly every form of
Intellectual Property (IP) available to him. In addition to his
belletristic writing (as Author), he saw three inventions through to
patent (as Inventor) and invested with the inventors of several more
patent holders, including Nikola Tesla.  Further, he created "brands"
and trademarks (e.g. his stage persona, as well as The Mark Twain
Company, through which he exploited and defended his Right of
Publicity), and even had Trade Secrets he sought to protect
(particularly, those of the Plasmon "nerve and brain food" supplements,
and most notoriously, those of the Paige Compositor). Twain's
involvement in the development of copyright law is well-known. What
more, then might be learned through an exploration of his initiatives
to, seemingly, explore  every avenue of IP? Was his most critical
motivator some spirit of Connecticut Yankee/Gilded Age entrepreneurship?
Or a simple desire for additional wealth, prosperity and status? If not
those, then what was it?

Our argument will be that, on balance, the key motivator pulling
together his efforts across the spectrum of exploitable IP was Twain's
foundational belief in the limitless potential of his creative
imagination, whatever the form of expression his imagination's insights
might take.

Intellectually, Twain enjoyed a boundless confidence in his own creative
abilities, although this confidence was beset by recurrent crises of
guilt and rage at his failures.  He lived in a period when intellectual
entrepreneurship was highly rewarded and commonly used as a means to
attaining higher social status.  He saw his lack of formal education as
presenting no impediment to the reach of his mind. In the literary
domain, his reading was omnivorous and his market-ready output,
prodigious. As to technology, he believed himself able to understand
diverse technologies with sufficient competence to invest his own funds,
and to recommend investment, although his confidence here obviously
outpaced his returns.
Specific forms of Intellectual Property were thus the foundation of each
of these initiatives, and his application of them is therefore important
to a more complete understanding not only of those activities his grand
nephew later published about under the title  "Mark Twain, Business
Man," but equally important to our comprehending Sam Clemens as creator,
discoverer, manager, and investor.