The concept of intellectual property – the idea that an idea can be owned – is a child of the European Enlightenment. It was only when people began to believe that knowledge came from the human mind working upon the senses–rather than through divine revelation, assisted by the study of ancient texts–that it became possible to imagine humans as creators, and hence owners, of new ideas rather than as mere transmitters of eternal verities.
Besides being distinctively modern, intellectual property is a dense concept, woven together from at least three complex strands of jurisprudence – copyright, patent, and trademark–each with its own sources in premodern custom and law, and each with its own trajectory into our own era. Still, copyright, and the complementary concepts of authors’ rights and literary property in continental law–the focus of