Copyright

Origins

Civilizations dating to ancient Egypt have inscribed unique marks on physical objects, such as bricks, to indicate ownership or craftsmanship. Greeks first used marks to indicate a creator's association with more cerebral products, such as art and literature. Romans further distinguished an author's right of ownership from an alienable right to reproduce a work. Chinese as early as the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.–A.D. 200) recognized an exclusive legal right to reproduce written works. But intellectual property notions in ancient Eastern cultures developed less fully than in the West because Eastern philosophical traditions tended to be more communal than individual notions of knowledge ownership.

In the West, the prominence of medieval guilds led to increased legal recognition and protection for marks that identified goods and services. These marks correlate closely with marks recognized in modern intellectual property law: trademarks, service marks, and certificate marks. Guilds also maintained trade secrets that correlate closely with modern trade secrets, protected by law against theft as long as the owner takes steps to maintain secrecy. The concept of the patent also dawned at this time, as governments sought to attract new scientific methods in the development of public works by offering creators exclusive legal rights in their designs.

With the introduction of moveable type in Europe in the mid-fifteenth century, authors and printers joined engineers and the traditional guilds in seeking enhanced legal protection for intellectual property. The Republic of Venice became renowned for obliging and accordingly attracting intellectual talent. Venice is credited with adoption of the first patent statute in 1474. The British Crown in 1557 provided a royal charter to the Stationers' Company, a powerful printers' guild, granting its members exclusive rights to reproduce written works, thus essentially to oversee a system of copyright. Governments thus protected intellectual property against piracy and awarded exclusive rights, or privileges, to intellectual property owners to profit from their graphic or mechanical designs and publications.

More definite statutory precursors to modern intellectual property law developed in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The 1623 Statute of Monopolies generally proscribed the monopolization of inventions, but operated as a patent law by protecting a creator's interest in an invention for the first 14 years. The 1710 statute of [Queen] Anne formalized copyright law, superseding the monopoly of the Stationers' Company. The statute established depository libraries for copyrighted works, gave authors a right of reproduction, and allowed them a 14-year term of copyright, renewable by still-living authors for 14 further years.

Following the lead of such eighteenth-century political philosophers as John Locke (1632–1704), postrevolution governments in the United States and France re-envisioned intellectual property as a natural right, rather than as a privilege awarded by government authority. Still, these new governments limited intellectual property rights with statutory terms. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 (Article I, section 8, clause 8) empowered Congress “[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.” Congress enacted copyright and patent laws in 1790, the former modeled on the Statute of Anne.

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