Patent and Copyright Law

Patent and Copyright Law. U.S. patent and copyright law is based on Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” This clause, when drafted in 1787, represented a culmination of legal and economic theory and practice regarding intellectual property going back at least as far as Renaissance Europe, where similar grants of exclusive rights were first recorded. In colonial America, though few patents and no copyrights in the modern sense were granted, practice generally followed English precedents. But whereas in England the Crown granted patents and copyrights as a royal prerogative, in America they were granted at first by colonial legislatures as private acts and later under general statutes enacted by the states.

In 1790, exercising its constitutional authority, Congress enacted the nation's first general patent and copyright statutes, effectively supplanting those of the states. The new statutes spelled out preconditions for the grants, general penalties to be imposed on infringers, and other details. Responsibility for issuing both patents and copyrights was assigned to the executive branch of the new government. The task of interpreting the statutes in disputed cases was left to the courts, whose decisions over the years constitute an enormous body of jurisprudence, much of which has found its way into statutory law. Periodic revisions in this body of law have sought to fine‐tune the balance of interests of inventors and authors, patent and copyright owners, and the general public. Most far‐reaching, perhaps, have been changes to what the statutes specify as patentable and copyrightable subject matter, changes made necessary by the ever unforeseen evolution of technology in new directions.

Through much of the nineteenth century, books or other materials published abroad enjoyed little copyright protection in the United States, and U.S. publishers freely pirated foreign works. The Berne Convention of 1887, updated most recently in 1971 by the Universal Copyright Convention at Paris (accepted by the United States in 1974), helped close this loophole. At the end of the twentieth century, the genetic manipulation of plants and even animal species, as well as the rise of the Internet and on‐line publishing, raised complicated new patent and copyright issues.
See also Printing and Publishing.

Bibliography

Bruce W. Bugbee , The Genesis of American Patent and Copyright Law, 1967.

Kendall J. Dood