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On the Nature of Inventions and Intellectual Property
Below is an interesting excerpt from Thomas Jefferson in 1813, as quoted by Stanford Law professor Larry Lessig (creator of the Creative Commons license) in his book the Future of Ideas...
Keep in mind that this was written 23 years after the creation of the US Patent Office, which was founded in part on the principles and guidance of Thomas Jefferson himself, who did not believe that ideas should be patented, but only physical inventions and who insisted on patent applications to include models.
By the way, on the first incarnation of the US patent Law, patents were issued for only fourteen (14) years with no possibility for extension... As the Virginia Slims campaign used to say... "You've come a long way, baby" (feel free to substitute "baby" with monopolistic/oligopolistic manipulative industry) to the decades of protection and extensions common today.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive 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 everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Thomas Jefferson.
