Who owns the ideas? The international regime of intellectual property rights has significantly shaped the control and distribution of knowledge for hundreds of years. It’s a story that began innocently enough in the fifteenth century, when Venice started awarding its famed glass-blowers 10-year patents to protect their novel creations from imitators. Show us how you made it, promised the law, and no one is permitted to copy you for a decade. It was a clever way for the city state to reward ingenuity, but as Venetian artisans emigrated, they took their demands for patents with them, so
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