The Foundations of Patent Protection Quiz

PDF page 20: A patent is an intellectual property right granted by the government of a nation to an inventor that gives them the exclusive right to the invention for up to 20 years, in exchange for disclosing the details of the new technology to society for its ultimate benefit. In the United States, a patent is a legal instrument in the form of a document issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It gives the inventor of any new, useful, and non-obvious machine, process, manufacture, or composition of matter the right “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States”

PDF page 20: for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of the invention. A U.S. patent is only recognized domestically, and cannot be enforced in another country.

PDF page 20: A patent is an intellectual property right granted by the government of a nation to an inventor that gives them the exclusive right to the invention for up to 20 years, in exchange for disclosing the details of the new technology to society for its ultimate benefit. In the United States, a patent is a legal instrument in the form of a document issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It gives the inventor of any new, useful, and non-obvious machine, process, manufacture, or composition of matter the right “to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States”

PDF page 21: The legal foundation for U.S. intellectual property rights was laid by the Founders in 1787, in the very first Article of the U.S. Constitution, which outlined the precepts of our democratic society. In Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, Congress was given the authority 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

PDF page 21: America was the first country in the world to enshrine intellectual property rights in its national constitution. And the Founders did this quite deliberately, says B. Zorina Khan, an economic historian at Bowdoin College whose book, The Democratization of Invention: Patents and Copyrights in American Economic Development,

PDF page 21: Indeed, the Founders viewed intellectual property rights as vital to the new nation’s economic survival. As George Washington himself stated in his first annual address to Congress in 1790, “The advancement of agriculture, commerce, and manufactures by all proper means will not, I trust, need recommendation. But I cannot forbear intimating to you the expediency of giving effectual encouragement to the introduction of new and useful inventions.” The question is, with all the challenges they faced, why did the Founders think it so crucial to create a strong intellectual property system? Their reasons were both universal—i.e., applying to all societies—and also very particular to America’s revolutionary experience.

PDF page 21: Every society that affirms intellectual property rights offers two justifications for doing so: the bargain or contract theory and the natural rights theory.

PDF page 21: The “bargain” theory starts with the commonsense premise that people will be encouraged to invent new products and services that benefit society if they are likely to profit by doing so. The U.S. Constitution thus offers inventors a bargain: If you invent something useful—e.g., a cotton gin in 1794 that boosted agricultural production a hundredfold, or a semiconductor 163 years later that sparked the creation of a trillion-dollar new industry and millions of jobs—then the Constitution and statutes say that, as a quid pro quo, you can have the exclusive right to that invention for a “limited time,” after which it goes into the public domain and belongs to society.

PDF page 21: The “bargain” theory starts with the commonsense premise that people will be encouraged to invent new products and services that benefit society if they are likely to profit by doing so. The U.S. Constitution thus offers inventors a bargain: If you invent something useful—e.g., a cotton gin in 1794 that boosted agricultural production a hundredfold, or a semiconductor 163 years later that sparked the creation of a trillion-dollar new industry and millions of jobs—then the Constitution and statutes say that, as a quid pro quo, you can have the exclusive right to that invention for a “limited time,” after which it goes into the public domain and belongs to society.

PDF page 22: There is something so simple yet economically potent about this concept. As Abraham Lincoln—America’s only presidential patentee (No. 6469 (https://www.openstax.org/l/US6469) for a device to lift boats over shoals)—noted, the beauty of the patent system is that it “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.”

PDF page 22: “Natural Rights” Theory The “natural rights” theory, meanwhile, invokes another commonsense premise that most of us instinctively hold to be true: that the product of mental labor is by all rights the property of its creator, no less than the product of physical labor is the property of its creator (or of the person who purchases it from that creator). This is what Daniel Webster was referring to when he said, “The American Constitution does not attempt to give an inventor a right to their invention, or an author a right to his composition; it recognizes an original, pre-existing, inherent right of property in such invention or composition.”

PDF page 23: Imagine a world in which there was no patent system to guarantee inventors property rights to their discoveries. In such a world, inventors would have every incentive to be secretive and to guard jealously their discoveries from competitors [because those discoveries] could, of course, be copied with impunity. “By contrast, in a world where property rights in invention were protected, the situation would be very different. Inventors would now feel free to promote their discoveries as widely as possible so as to maximize returns either from commercializing their ideas themselves or from [licensing] rights to the idea to others. The protections offered by the patent system would thus be an important stimulus to the exchange of technological information in and of themselves. Moreover, it is likely that the cross -fertilization that resulted