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Intellectual Property Rights Of The United States

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Intellectual property rights were first born as far back as medieval Europe. During these times, groups of artisans in a particular industry were given permission from the government to control conduct in other industries. These group’s job were to oversee what items were being imported, marketed, produced as well as how new inventions were introduced to the market. [1] Intellectual law during this time period was driven mainly by political and religious reasons since they were a huge part of everyday life. In 1710, intellectual law was made more specific with the passing of the Statute of Anne. This gave inventors an initial 14-year protection period and a possible 14-year renewal. However, it did not protect the inventor from foreign-language translations and the people were able to complain if prices were too high. [2] The start of intellectual property rights in Europe gave way to a birth of our own system of intellectual law in the United States. Once the colonies were seceded from British rule, each of the original 13 colonies created its own copyright law. At the time, this sounded like a good idea, however it was later realized that having separate copyright laws only made things confusing. [3] Laws in one colony were not enforceable in another and a solution needed to be made. It was decided that to fix this problem, the national government should be responsible for coming up with a copyright law that has to be followed by the country as a whole, not individual

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