nvention and technology. Patent law rewards creativity by giving inventors exclusive rights to exploit their inventions for a set period of years. This benefits society by creating huge incentives for researchers to develop new products. The limit on years balances the inventors' need to be able to exploit their creation with society's need to spread the benefit of that invention to more people. Thus, after a number of years, the patent expires, and others can produce similar products for less, allowing more people to benefit. This is especially true for drugs.
Similarly, copyright law is not to be confused with trademark law, which is designed to protect corporate identities. Companies spend millions to establish a brand identity, and the trademark law protects that identity against encroachment.
Today, copyrights seemingly are under siege because of technology such as the Internet. Ironically, another technological advanceùthe printing pressùgave birth to copyright law several centuries ago. Gutenberg's invention allowed writers to mass produce their ideas on paper, and that paper was bound into a book and sold to the public. This transformed the economics of books.
Before the press, those who would pirate the ideas of others had to labor long and hard to copy a book. Such an endeavor had little benefit. But the printing press lowered the cost of printing dramatically, and ôfor the first time, the value of the author's genius could outweigh the cost of the scrivener's labor.ö
Now it became a question of who should benefit: The writer who penned the work, the publisher who took the risk and financed the endeavor, or the public, in the form of lower prices? In England, these questions were answered by the crown, which did not weigh the competing interests but only considered its self-interest. Thus, the king or queen rewarded those in favor with the exclusive right (called a patent) to print particular ...