Patent

• 1. Introduction

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  A patent is a government-backed promise: share your invention with the world, and the world will leave you alone to profit from it for a fixed period of time. That bargain sits at the center of modern economies, yet most people have never read a patent claim, never filed an application, and never thought about where the idea came from. It originated in the Latin word patere, meaning "to lay open." To make something visible, inspectable, public. The earliest version wasn't a document you filed with a bureaucracy. It was a letter from a king. And the first recorded recipient was a Florentine architect in 1421 who figured out how to move marble by barge. What makes a society decide that ideas can be owned? How did that decision get locked into law, spread across continents, and become the subject of fierce debate that runs all the way to today's pharmaceutical pricing and vaccine rollouts? Those are the questions at the heart of this story.

• 2. From Venice to Parliament

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  Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer and architect who designed the dome of Florence's cathedral, was granted the first recorded industrial patent in 1421. His invention was a new method for transporting marble from quarries along the river Arno by barge. The Venetian Senate gave him an exclusive privilege valid for three years. During that window, no one else could build, use, or copy the device without his consent; violators faced confiscation of their vessel and further penalties. This was genuinely new legal territory. For the first time, a state recognized technical innovation as something that deserved an exclusive right attached to a specific person.

  Venice moved quickly to formalize this principle. In 1474 the Venetian Senate issued the Venetian Patent Statute, which required inventors to register new and inventive devices with the Republic in exchange for legal protection against infringers. The protection lasted ten years. As Venetians emigrated across Europe, they carried the idea with them, seeding similar systems elsewhere.

  In England, the first recorded patent went in 1449 to a Flemish glassmaker named John of Utynam, granting him a twenty-year monopoly on making stained glass. Venice was granting similar rights around the same time, typically for glassmaking. The English Crown grew enthusiastic about letters patent, then abusive of them, handing out monopolies on everyday goods until public anger forced a reckoning. King James I was compelled to revoke existing monopolies and limit new ones to "projects of new invention." That commitment was written into the Statute of Monopolies in 1624, which restricted the Crown explicitly to issuing patents only to inventors of original works for a fixed term. That statute became the foundation on which later English and international patent law was built.

• 3. The American Experiment

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  Samuel Hopkins of Vermont received the first patent granted under the United States Patent Act on the 31st of July, 1790, for a method of producing potash, also known as potassium carbonate. The Act itself had been signed into law on the 10th of April, 1790, titled "An Act to promote the progress of useful Arts." Before that federal framework existed, inventors in the Thirteen Colonies had to petition individual colonial legislatures. Samuel Winslow obtained the first patent in North America that way, from the Massachusetts General Court in 1641, for a new process of making salt.

  The American system matured through revision. A new patent law passed in 1793, and a major overhaul followed in 1836. The 1836 revision introduced a genuinely rigorous examination process. Between 1790 and 1836, roughly ten thousand patents had been granted. By the time of the American Civil War, the number had reached about eighty thousand.

  Women faced explicit barriers within the system from the start. Although section 1 of the 1790 Patent Act used the pronoun "she," married women were legally prohibited from owning property in their own name, including income from their own inventions. The first English patent known to be granted to a woman was to Mrs. Amye Everard Ball in 1637, for a tincture of saffron. That historical exclusion left lasting marks. As of 2015, only 8% of inventors in the UK were female, a disparity attributed to both historical barriers and the underrepresentation of women in patent-intensive fields, particularly in STEM. Researchers including Marcowitz-Bitton and colleagues have argued that internal bias within the patent system itself also contributes to the gap.

• 4. The Rules of the Game

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  Under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, a patent should be available in any WTO member state for any invention in any field of technology, provided three conditions are met: it must be new, involve an inventive step, and be capable of industrial application. The minimum term of protection the agreement sets is twenty years. That number also appears in the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, first signed in 1883, which set a baseline of twenty years and established what is arguably its most practical provision: a filing in any one member state preserves the right to file in any other member state for one year, with the benefit of the original filing date.

  The Patent Cooperation Treaty, administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization and covering more than 150 countries, extends that window. Under the PCT, an international applicant receives a thirty-month priority period rather than the Paris Convention's standard twelve months. An application filed under the PCT goes through three stages: filing, examination during the international phase, and examination during the national phase.

  Owning a patent does not mean owning the right to use the invention. It means owning the right to exclude others from using it. If an inventor improves on an earlier patented device that still has time left on its own patent term, the inventor can only deploy that improvement legally if the original patent holder consents, and that holder is free to refuse. The patent, like any property right, can be sold, licensed, mortgaged, assigned, or abandoned. In the United States, maintenance fees fall due at 3.5, 7.5, and 11.5 years after issuance, and only about half of issued US patents are maintained for their full term. Large corporations tend to see the fees through to the end; smaller entities are more likely to let patents lapse under market pressure, even though their fees run roughly five times lower.

• 5. The Decline of Innovation

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  Japan overtook the United States as the world leader in patent families filed between 1900 and 1966, and since 2007 China has led the world. Yet across most technologically advanced countries, the total number of patent families filed has been falling in absolute terms since roughly the 1970s and 1980s. Normalized for population, the American peak in patenting occurred in 1915, and the rate at which each subsequent patent generated further patents has been declining since 1926.

  A study of 4,512 patents obtained by Stanford University between 1970 and 2020 found that the university's patenting activity plateaued in the 2010s. Of those patents, only 20% produced a positive net income for the university; the remainder represented a net loss.

  Researchers have proposed several explanations for the broader decline. One holds that the easiest research problems have already been solved, making each new discovery more expensive to reach. A related argument identifies a productivity fall per researcher, because the difficulty of reaching harder results outpaces efficiency gains from better computing and communication. A third hypothesis ties innovation rates to population growth rather than to the size of the total population, linking the slowdown to resource-limited demographic dynamics. In the United States specifically, court decisions in 2012, 2013, and 2014 limiting business method patents and biological patents have been identified as contributing factors. And in about 50% of cases, patents that are registered but never commercialized effectively block similar ideas from being registered by others, creating a growing zone where new patents cannot be obtained.

• 6. Critics and Alternatives

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  In 2011, United States business entities incurred $29 billion in direct costs because of patent trolls, which the source defines as non-practicing entities that hold patents without contributing to innovation and enforce them aggressively. By 2012, lawsuits brought by patent assertion companies made up 61% of all patent cases, according to data from the Santa Clara University School of Law.

  Economists Michele Boldrin and David Levine published a conclusion that goes further than most critics: they propose abolishing patents entirely and replacing them with other legislative instruments less susceptible to lobbying and rent-seeking, applied only where evidence shows that a free market undersupplies innovation. A 2016 paper argued for substantial weakening of patents on grounds that technologies including 3D printing, cloud computing, and synthetic biology have reduced the cost of innovation enough to undercut the traditional justification for strong patent protection.

  Pharmaceutical patents attract particular criticism. In 2020, India and South Africa led a coalition calling for a waiver of TRIPS vaccine patents to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine deployment. Critics of the initiative responded that manufacturing knowledge, not intellectual property rights, was the primary barrier to scaling production.

  Several alternatives exist. A defensive publication describes an invention in enough detail to establish prior art, blocking others from patenting it, without the inventor claiming any exclusivity. A trade secret keeps information confidential indefinitely, protected by non-disclosure agreements and labor law, with no disclosure to the public required and no expiration date. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and patent critic, has proposed prizes as a substitute: direct financial rewards for solving specific problems, which would sidestep the monopoly pricing that patents enable on drugs for diseases like AIDS. In 2014, Google and other technology companies founded the LOT Network to combat patent assertion entities by cross-licensing their patents, removing the ability of trolls to weaponize those rights against members.

• 7. Biopiracy and the 2024 Treaty

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  After two decades of drafting, the World Intellectual Property Organization convened a Diplomatic Conference in May 2024 and adopted the GRATK Treaty, formally titled the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. The treaty mandates disclosure requirements for patent applications based on genetic resources or associated traditional knowledge. Patents filed incorrectly under the treaty's rules face revocation.

  Representatives of Indigenous peoples have described the GRATK Treaty as a first step toward guaranteeing just and transparent access to these resources. The treaty is seen as complementing the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity, which established an international framework for access and benefit-sharing from genetic resources. The planned extension of the treaty's scope will determine whether it resolves longstanding tensions between the global patent system and communities whose biological knowledge has historically been appropriated without credit or compensation. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Patent Busting Project, launched in 2004 to challenge patents the organization considers illegitimate, represents a parallel and older form of that resistance, targeting patents that suppress innovation or limit online expression by submitting formal challenges to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.