History of Intellectual Property

An insight into the evolution of the concept of intellectual property

Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

Current usage of the term intellectual property takes us back to 1888 with the establishment of the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property (the Bureau fédéral de la propriété intellectuelle) in Berne. The administrative secretariats located in Berne adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title When they established by the Paris Convention (1883) and the Berne Convention (1886) merged in 1893, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property. The organization consequently moved to Geneva in 1960, and was succeeded in 1967 with the foundation of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to Lemley, the term really began to be used in the United States (which had not been a party to the Berne Convention) only at this point, and it did not enter common usage until coining of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.

The concept appears to have made its first form after the French revolution. In an 1818 collection of his writings, the French liberal theorist, Benjamin Constant, argued against the recently-introduced idea of "property which has been called intellectual." The term intellectual property can be found used in an October 1845 Massachusetts Circuit Court ruling in the patent case Davoll et al. v. Brown., in which Justice Charles L. Woodbury wrote that "only in this way can we protect intellectual property, the efforts of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own...as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." (1 Woodb. & M. 53, 3 West.L.J. 151, 7 F.Cas. 197, No. 3662, 2 Robb.Pat.Cas. 303, Merw.Pat.Inv. 414).

The concept's origins can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of current intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist – notably the principle of Hasagat Ge'vul (unfair encroachment) was used to validate limited-term publisher (but not author) copyright in the 16th century.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, drafters of the Copyright Clause, were both quite doubtful to the monopolies of copyright, and monopolies of patents, and argued extensively on the subject.

Stable ownership is the award of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of restricted property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one owners the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

Article Tags: Intellectual Property

Source: Free Articles from ArticlesFactory.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR