Venice wrote the first patent law in 1474, and its rules still hold
On 19 March 1474 the Republic of Venice offered protection for any new and ingenious device that was useful and had not been made before. That short statute is usually considered the world's first codified patent system, and its core tests of novelty and usefulness still underpin patent law today.
Older glimmers exist. Around 500 BCE the Greek city of Sybaris reportedly granted a year's exclusive right to anyone who invented a new refinement in luxury. In the sixteenth century, Jewish legal principles against unfair encroachment were used to justify limited-term protection for publishers, though not authors. English patents began not with inventors at all but with monopoly grants handed out by Elizabeth I; only about two centuries later did a patent come to mean an inventor's exclusive right. The Statute of Monopolies in 1624 and the Statute of Anne in 1710 are treated as the foundations of modern patent and copyright law.
The phrase itself took time to catch on. British courts in the 1760s and 1770s argued over literary property, and a 1769 magazine piece gave the earliest known use of intellectual property. An American judge in 1845 compared the labours of the mind to the wheat a farmer grows. International bureaux formed under the Paris and Berne conventions adopted the term in 1893, and the World Intellectual Property Organization followed in 1967. According to legal scholar Mark Lemley, Americans rarely used the phrase until the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980.
The underlying puzzle is economic. Unlike land, an idea can be used by any number of people without running out, and a creator can do little to stop the first buyer from copying and underselling. The law answers with time-limited rights: patents trade a period of exclusivity for public disclosure of how an invention works, while copyright protects the particular expression of a work but not the ideas beneath it. Getting the balance right, strong enough to reward creation yet loose enough to allow wide use, is the central challenge.
The 1995 TRIPS agreement folded these rights into world trade for the first time, though critics argue a single standard ignores differences between rich and poor countries.
Source: Intellectual property
