The Invention of Intellectual Property

Copyright, patent, and trademark are not natural rights: they are legal instruments invented at specific times to serve specific interests. The expansion of intellectual property rights over the past forty years was a deliberate political project, pursued by specific industries, over the objection of economists who predicted (correctly) that it would harm innovation. Understanding this history is essential for evaluating current claims about AI training data, open source licensing, and platform ownership of content created by users. The Statute of Anne, enacted in England in 1710, is generally identified as the first copyright law. It was not passed to protect authors, but to end a monopoly held by the London Stationers’ Company, a guild of printers that had controlled the trade in printed books since the sixteenth century, and to create a new system of publisher monopolies that would operate for limited terms. Authors received rights in the statute, but only to the extent that they…