...in 1447 Venice passed the first general statute providing for patents covering inventions. It allowed that inventors or introducers of devices new to the Venetian territory would be protected against imitators for ten years; at the same time it formally compelled all inventors to reveal their inventions to the state, which was exempt from the patent restriction and could freely appropriate them.
Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Guttenberg to Gates, by Adrian Johns, 2009. p. 200.
This is how the perpetum mobile of human society works: invention has value because we agreed, some six centuries ago, to think it has value.
tags: invention, innovation, space, law, information, distribution, control, quote, history
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