Patent

:This article relates to the intellectual property right. A land grant is also called a patent.

Quotes

: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.

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::- Thomas Jefferson

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:Certainly an inventor ought to be allowed a right to the benefit of his invention for some certain time. Nobody wishes more than I do that ingenuity should receive liberal encouragement. In the arts, and especially in the mechanical arts, many ingenious improvements are made in consequence of the patent right giving exclusive use of them for fourteen years.

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::-Thomas Jefferson

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:Before then ', any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.

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::-Abraham Lincoln, Second lecture on discoveries and inventions, February 11, 1859 http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=lincoln;cc=lincoln;sid=43225f3f7e7e554e73e45a29256588d9;q1=patent%20system;rgn=main;view=text;idno=lincoln3 (from page 356b) http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/discoveries.htm

Related Topics:
Abraham Lincoln - February 11 - 1859

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: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.

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::-F.A. von Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 1948

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:A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and can't travel any way but sideways and backwards.

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::-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889.

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