When the Venetians created the first patent system in the 14th Century, the role thereof, as it is widely believed by scholars, lawyers and users of today’s patent systems, has been to encourage inventors not to keep their inventions secret anymore, rather to disclose them through a governmental channel to the public. That would, according to the intention of the creators of the first patent system and still believed to be applicable today, give “followers,” i.e. “improvers” of certain technologies that otherwise would have to be held secret to stand, as Isaac Newton has expressed it, on the shoulders of giants etc., thereby improving the speed of technological developments.
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