History of United States patent law
[2][3][4] In 1474, in Venice, the first known patent law that granted inventors exclusive rights to their inventions was passed as a result of an economic policy.
These aspects have carried forward and helped shape the United States Patent Law.
[1][4] In America in the early colonial period, there were no general laws providing for the issuing of patents.
The Massachusetts General Court gave Samuel Winslow an exclusive right to utilize a new process of making salt for 10 years.
This custom of using private acts to grant patents is often said to have come from the early in England, particularly the English Statute of Monopolies of 1624.
Near the end of the 18th century, states started to pass general patent laws replacing the case-specific acts.
Although most of its terms concerned the protection of copyrights, it also included the following provision: "The Inventors of useful machines shall have a like exclusive privilege of making or vending their machines for the like term of 14 years, under the same privileges and restrictions hereby granted to, and imposed on, the authors of books.
"[8][9] Many other states followed suit in passing general patent acts, most using a 14-year term, resembling English practices.
[10] The Constitution of the United States, first adopted on September 17, 1787, had a provision for protecting intellectual properties.
The provision is found in Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have Power ... 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.
At the same time, the people responsible for examining and granting patents had other important duties to attend to and could not carry out the process quickly.
The act was notable for its definition of the subjects of patents which remains unchanged until now: "any new and useful art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter and any new and useful improvement on any art, machine, manufacture or composition of matter".
The examination process was simplified by dropping the clause that patented inventions needed to be "sufficiently useful and important".
Thomas Jefferson, who was Secretary of State at the time, realized the need to employ experts into the patent examination process.
“America thus became, by national policy and legislative act, the world’s premier legal sanctuary for industrial pirates.
It freed the Secretary of State from the enormous duty of granting patents, when he had many other significant tasks to tend to.
And lastly, it finally removed the US nationality and residency requirements, making it possible for foreigners to file for US patents.
This skepticism towards patents again returned after World War II in another period of economic depression.
The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit assured the uniformity of the patent case law in the country.
[25] In 2011, the Leahy–Smith America Invents Act (AIA) enacted the most significant change to the U.S. patent system since 1952.
The only President of the United States to hold a patent was Abraham Lincoln for a "device to buoy vessels over shoals"; it consisted of a set of retractable floats mounted on the sides of riverboats.
