Example
If the better mousetrap patent is filed on January 1, 1996 and is issued or granted on January 1, 2000, it will lapse twenty years from filing: January 1, 2016. However, if the inventor comes up with a second improvement and claims priority to her first patent when filing the second patent on January 1, 1998, that second patent, after grant, would lapse twenty years from the earliest claimed priority: January 1, 2016.
Early history of patents
Although there is evidence suggesting that something like patents was used among some ancient Greek cities, patents in the modern sense originated in England with the Statute of Monopolies in 1624 under King James I of England. Prior to this time, the crown would issue letters patent providing any person with a "monopoly" to produce particular goods or provide particular services. This power, which was to raise money for the crown, was widely abused, and court began to limit the circumstances in which they could be granted. Parliament eventually restricted the crown's power explicitly through the Statute of Monopolies so that the King could only issue letters patents to the inventors or introducers of original inventions for a fixed number of years. Section 6 of the Statute refers to "manner[s] of new manufacture . . . [by] inventors", and this section remains the foundation for patent law in England and Australia. The Statute of Monopolies was latter developed by the courts to produce modern patent law; this innovation was soon adopted by other countries.
On July 31, 1790 inventor Samuel Hopkins became the first person issued patent in the United States. In 1834, the first black man granted a patent, Henry Blair (of Glenross, Maryland), patents a corn planter. In 1836, on August 31, Blair was issued a cotton seed planter patent. In 1863, Alfred Nobel gains Swedish patent for the preparation of nitroglycerin (originally called "blasting oil"). In 1868, Nobel patented form of safe handling dynamite.
Quote
- 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
- ''In the field of industrial patents in particular we shall have seriously to examine whether the award of a monopoly privilege is really the most appropriate and effective form of reward for the kind of risk bearing which investment in scientific research involves.
- - F.A. von Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 1948
See also: law, intellectual property, chemical patent, software patent, list of top United States patent recipients.
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