The principles in the Declaration of Independence have informed and enriched the lives of Americans and peoples the world over who yearn for civil and political freedom. With few exceptions in the world today, nations have chosen to let market forces determine the direction and speed at which their economies develop. Under this system, authors are free to write and live by writing if they can manage to command the attention of a large enough segment of the populace to make the dissemination of their works even marginally profitable. Trademark protection is similarly imbued with these characteristics. A free market can hardly exist without a strong and effective trademark law.
Patent protection gives inventors the exclusive right to exploit their inventions.
This exclusive right gives them the economic security and, thereby, the freedom to follow any path along which their human ingenuity and imagination may lead them. Historical Roots Intellectual property is neither a new nor a static concept. The grant by a state of some form of exclusive rights in their inventions to inventors originated in the early part of the 15th century in Venice and spread rapidly during the 16th century to Germany, France, the Netherlands, and England. It was early recognized that in a free market economy, patent protection provides the necessary incentive to invent, to disclose the invention, to invest in the commercial development of the invention, and to motivate others to add to the store of human knowledge by designing around the patented invention. The Statute of Queen Anne, enacted in 1709 in England, was the first true copyright statute and the first recognition of the source of the copyright interest in the creative act of authorship.