Intellectual property
Intellectual property is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets. The modern concept of intellectual property developed in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term "intellectual property" began to be used in the 19th century, though it was not until the late 20th century that intellectual property became commonplace in most of the world's legal systems.
Supporters of intellectual property laws often describe their main purpose as encouraging the creation of a wide variety of intellectual goods. To achieve this, the law gives people and businesses property rights to certain information and intellectual goods they create, usually for a limited period of time. Supporters argue that because IP laws allow people to protect their original ideas and prevent unauthorized copying, creators derive greater individual economic benefit from the information and intellectual goods they create, and thus have more economic incentives to create them in the first place. Advocates of IP believe that these economic incentives and legal protections stimulate innovation and contribute to technological progress of certain kinds.
The intangible nature of intellectual property presents difficulties when compared with traditional property like land or goods. Unlike traditional property, intellectual property is "indivisible", since an unlimited number of people can in theory "consume" an intellectual good without its being depleted. Additionally, investments in intellectual goods suffer from appropriation problems: Landowners can surround their land with a robust fence and hire armed guards to protect it, but producers of information or literature can usually do little to stop their first buyer from replicating it and selling it at a lower price. Balancing rights so that they are strong enough to encourage the creation of intellectual goods but not so strong that they prevent the goods' wide use is the primary focus of modern intellectual property law.
History
The Venetian Patent Statute of 19 March 1474, established by the Republic of Venice, is usually considered to be the earliest codified patent system in the world. It states that patents might be granted for "any new and ingenious device, not previously made", provided it was useful. By and large, these principles still remain the basic principles of current patent laws. The Statute of Monopolies and the British Statute of Anne are seen as the origins of the current patent law and copyright respectively, firmly establishing the concept of intellectual property."Literary property" was the term predominantly used in the British legal debates of the 1760s and 1770s over the extent to which authors and publishers of works also had rights deriving from the common law of property, Hinton v Donaldson, Donaldson v Becket ). The first known use of the term intellectual property dates to this time, when a piece published in the Monthly Review in 1769 used the phrase. The first clear example of modern usage goes back as early as 1808, when it was used as a heading title in a collection of essays.
The German equivalent was used with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property to the confederation. When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention and the Berne Convention merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property.
The organization subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960 and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization by treaty as an agency of the United Nations. According to legal scholar Mark Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States, and it did not enter popular usage there until passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980.
The history of patents does not begin with inventions, but rather with royal grants by Queen Elizabeth I for monopoly privileges. Approximately 200 years after the end of Elizabeth's reign, however, a patent represents a legal right obtained by an inventor providing for exclusive control over the production and sale of his mechanical or scientific invention. demonstrating the evolution of patents from royal prerogative to common-law doctrine.
The term 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 labors of the mind, productions and interests are as much a man's own... as the wheat he cultivates, or the flocks he rears." The statement that "discoveries are... property" goes back earlier. Section 1 of the French law of 1791 stated, "All new discoveries are the property of the author; to assure the inventor the property and temporary enjoyment of his discovery, there shall be delivered to him a patent for five, ten or fifteen years." In Europe, French author A. Nion mentioned propriété intellectuelle in his Droits civils des auteurs, artistes et inventeurs, published in 1846.
Until the 2000s, the purpose of intellectual property law was to give as little protection as possible in order to encourage innovation. Historically, legal protection was therefore granted only when necessary to encourage invention, and it was limited in time and scope. This is mainly as a result of knowledge being traditionally viewed as a public good, in order to allow its extensive dissemination and improvement.
The concept's origin can potentially be traced back further. Jewish law includes several considerations whose effects are similar to those of modern intellectual property laws, though the notion of intellectual creations as property does not seem to exist—notably the principle of Hasagat Ge'vul was used to justify limited-term publisher copyright in the 16th century. In 500 BCE, the government of the Greek state of Sybaris offered one year's patent "to all who should discover any new refinement in luxury".
According to Jean-Frédéric Morin, "the global intellectual property regime is currently in the midst of a paradigm shift". Up until the early 2000s, the global IP regime used to be dominated by high standards of protection characteristic of IP laws from Europe or the United States, with a vision that uniform application of these standards over every country and to several fields with little consideration over social, cultural or environmental values or of the national level of economic development. Morin argues that "the emerging discourse of the global IP regime advocates for greater policy flexibility and greater access to knowledge, especially for developing countries". With the Development Agenda adopted by WIPO in 2007, a set of 45 recommendations to adjust WIPO's activities to the specific needs of developing countries and aim to reduce distortions especially on issues such as patients' access to medicines, Internet users' access to information, farmers' access to seeds, programmers' access to source codes or students' access to scientific articles. However, this paradigm shift has not yet manifested itself in concrete legal reforms at the international level.
Similarly, it is based on these background that the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement requires members of the WTO to set minimum standards of legal protection, but its objective to have a "one-fits-all" protection law on Intellectual Property has been viewed with controversies regarding differences in the development level of countries. Despite the controversy, the agreement has extensively incorporated intellectual property rights into the global trading system for the first time in 1995, and has prevailed as the most comprehensive agreement reached by the world.