Patents are one of our most important legal concepts — atleast from the perspective of invention ideas and intellectual property.
Without patenting your invention, you’d have no way of controlling its use and
your role in its evolution, which is why we grant worthy inventors a monopoly
on using their ideas.
However, the patent system that’s widely in use today isolder than you might know. States and similar entities have been giving out
intellectual monopolies since the days of Ancient Greece. With that in mind,
we’ll look at some of the most critical milestones in the development of modern
patents.
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Ancient Patents
We can’t know which ancient states gave out the firstpatent-like monopolies for sure — there’s no surviving record of most similar
legal documents and decrees. However, we know that Ancient Greek states gave
out similar allowances to the creators of new dishes, for example, around 500
BC.
Still, most historians agree that the first patent roughlyequivalent to the word’s modern meaning was given out in the late 15th century
AD. A Venetian legal body decreed the first Patent Statute in 1474 AD. According
to experts in intellectual property law, that’s the first reliable evidence of
patents as an intellectual property concept — it declared the importance of
preserving and defining an inventor’s rights to the exploitation of their
ideas.
Elizabethan England
Fast-forward to 17th-century Britain, and we see thatEngland’s royal court routinely grants a wide range of monopolies — over the
trafficking of goods, the use of specific manufacturing techniques, and among
other things, inventions.
Once the Crown’s power was curtailed and the Statute ofMonopolies was declared, the granting of patents was limited to truly novel
inventions. This approach was adopted to preserve innovation while encouraging
the dissemination of ideas and technology across the Anglo-Saxon world.
Paris Convention
It’s hard to point at one era of human innovation and markit as more important and fruitful than all the others. However, if we were to
make such a list, the age of the Industrial Revolution would surely be among
the top contenders.
As the 19th century drew to a close, the vast technologicalstrides made by European nations led to much closer regional and, subsequently,
global collaboration. This created the need for an international agreement on
intellectual property laws and patent protection — culminating in the 1883
Paris Convention.
According to this agreement, all the participating countriesadopted nominally agreed on basic patent system principles to provide global
protection to innovative ideas and individuals.
International Collaboration
The abovementioned Paris Convention set some basicprinciples for patent law — like patentability requirements, protection terms,
and conflict resolution mechanisms. Still, the patent procedures in individual
countries remained significantly different for the foreseeable future.
The next paradigm shift in the world of innovation camealmost a century later, with the signing of the Patent Cooperation Treaty in
1970. The PCT finally harmonized the different patent systems in developed
countries, and other national systems would soon follow suit.
The examination and filing of patent applications became auniform process across a large chunk of the world — making it easy for
inventors to simultaneously protect their ideas and inventions in many
different countries with just one patent application.
Of course, the Paris Convention and the PCT wouldn’trepresent the end of the global evolution of patents. The EPC — European Patent
Convention — would be signed just a few years later, in 1973. While important,
it was still more of an evolution than a revolution; the EPC deepened some
solutions of the previous treaties and further harmonized national systems.
Also, many smaller subsequent treaties with different countries and blocs
spread this ecosystem of intellectual property across the world.
Trademarks and Patents
Many people confuse patents and trademarks, often believingthey’re the same thing.
In reality, trademarks aren’t patents — instead, they’re aseal that confirms a good’s authenticity. They protect marks like logos,
images, and phrases that we use to differentiate between various types of
products.
So, a good can be protected by both a patent and atrademark. A patent protects others from profiting off your invention by selling
it under another name, while a trademark stops people from using similar
designs, logos, and marks.
You can trademark symbols, phrases, designs, or a combo ofall of them — as long as they’re used to distinguish services and products from
one another. That’s why your mark needs to be unique; if it sounds, means, or
looks like another trademark, you can’t create a trademark of your own.
There’s another way trademarks and patents are different —you rarely apply for a trademark immediately after creating a product or a
service. In practice, it takes time to build up your brand recognition. And
that’s critical for trademarking, since your name, design, or logo needs to be
different and recognizable enough to warrant a trademark in the first place.
