Mineral mining is among the most dangerous jobs in the world. According to the ILO, mining accounted for about 8 percent of the world’s work-related fatalities in 2015 but only represents 1 percent of the global workforce. Despite these dangers, the long-run trend in the USA shows a significant decline in mine-related fatalities. This reflects positive changes in a number of factors, but technological innovations are likely to be one of the most important sources of improvements in health and safety outcomes at US mining operations. This chapter explores technological innovations in mineral mining health and safety, using patent data by describing the broad trends in US mineral mining patents as well as the subgroup related to health and safety. The chapter also provides an overview of the development of US mining legislation culminating with the passage of the US MINER Act of 2006 and describes this program and the patented technological innovations associated with federally supported research through the program. The final section performs descriptive regression analyses to relate the innovations stimulated by the program to health and safety outcomes in mineral mining.

This chapter focuses on the international extension of modern intellectual property, highlighting America's place in a regime of intellectual property that today is global. We trace the foundations for this global regime in international treaty frameworks, focusing on the legal parallels between treaties and contracts, as instruments of legal power. We briefly sketch the twentieth century developments of intellectual property law in the U.S., highlighting the juristic "solicitude" that is shown to intellectual property in U.S. lawmaking and international diplomacy. In the wake of World War II, the U.S. has used its position of global economic power to solidify commitments to intellectual property in a legal framework for trade relations that constitutes a super-national organization, the World Trade Organization, one that has facilitated global convergence in intellectual property law. New dangers and challenges are facing us today, in this globalized legal order, with the rise of artificial intelligence, and with patent claims extending very deeply into the social dimensions of human life, through computer-implemented inventions.