Assassinations, Threats, Cover-ups, Greed - A History of Intellectual Property
A Not Lame, Captivating History of Intellectual Property
Credit Axiom
Assassination, greed, cover-ups, rewriting history, and threats have driven much of intellectual property law today, and most don’t know it.
This Week’s Focus: Intellectual Property
What You’ll Understand: The history behind today’s intellectual property rules can be interesting and exciting for everyone.
Reading Time: 12 minutes for full analysis + key takeaways highlighted throughout
Key Question: What is a not lame, captivating way to tell the history of intellectual property?
My Take: There are millions of interesting intellectual property stories to highlight in a comprehensive history. The stories depicted below represent some of the biggest moments and most captivating, with highlights including assassinations, greed, cover-ups, threats, and more.
Quick Context: This deep dive connects to our core work on intellectual property, including the future of the field. New to Brainwaves? We explore the forces reshaping our world across venture capital, energy, space, economics, intellectual property, and philosophy. Subscribe here for bi-weekly deep dives plus weekly current events.
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Let’s dive in.
Honestly, it’s often hard to get excited about intellectual property. I’m impressed you made it this far. I’ve been meaning to write a background and history of intellectual property, but I knew it would normally read like a textbook—and we don’t want that.
I’ve made it my mission to find the best, most interesting stories on intellectual property to help tell the story of how the field has changed over time. It’ll be worth your time whether or not you know anything about intellectual property, or whether you know a lot.
To frame our discussion today, we’ll give a quick overview of some of the major intellectual property milestones from ancient times to modern day, highlighting how assassination, threats, the oath to swear to tell the truth and only the truth, an anti-monopolist producing the most popular game promoting monopolies, corporations and the “victors” rewriting history, unabashed corporate greed, cover-ups, and political lobbying shaped the intellectual property policies of today.
The Venetian Glassblowers: Arguably the First “Trade Secrets”
You’ve probably never heard of the stories behind the Venetian practice of glass blowing, but it reads like an action-packed Ancient Greek tale.
The Venetian city-state grew during the decline of the Roman Empire in the 400s (A.D.) as people fled invasions for the safety of the islands. Small communities began to form, among which Venice became the most popular.
The city became highly successful, becoming one of Europe’s trade capitals. Traders sold a wide range of goods in Venice, including spices, precious metals, gemstones, ivory, silks, and, most importantly to our story, glass. All of this trading led to an influx of capital in the region, promoting the development of an upper middle class and a wealthy merchant class. With this wealth came a greater appreciation for the finer things in life, such as art and architecture.
Researchers estimate that the practice of glass blowing began in Venice as early as 450 A.D. The earliest evidence is from the 700s-800s. Fast forward to the 1200s, and glassblowing has become a major portion of the Venetian economy. As such, the local governments strove to find any way to protect their models and prevent anyone from copying them.
And voilà, we have arguably one of the first forms of trade secrets! In 1291, most of Venice’s glassmaking industry was forcibly confined to the island of Murano—it’s a cluster of islands linked by short bridges, located around a mile north of the Venetian mainland in the Venetian lagoon.
The primary official reason cited was to prevent the threat of a disastrous fire from consuming all of Venice, as the furnaces used to make and blow glass are extremely hot and pose a significant fire hazard in a primarily wooden city.
However, this move also served to keep the technology of glassmaking, and, critically, the glassmakers themselves, confined to Murano. This drastically prevented the spread of Venetian glassblowing expertise from any competitors.
The rules were so drastic that glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without government permission. If a glassmaker left the city without permission, they would be ordered to return. If they did not return, an assassin would be sent to kill them!
Did this actually happen?
It’s unclear exactly, but in 1667, the French Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, successfully bribed and kidnapped several Murano glassworkers to come to Paris to teach the French how to make high-end mirrors. At this point, the French were spending millions of francs on the mirrors (they were more expensive than gold).
The Venetian Republic did not take this lightly. After several warnings were ignored, two of the top Venetian glassmakers in Paris died suddenly and agonizingly of stomach pains within weeks of each other. Historical records and diplomatic correspondence from the time strongly suggest they were poisoned by Venetian agents.
In this era and for many years to come, intellectual property (particularly trade secrets at this point) was protected by physical walls and threats, rather than by legal rights. In the humorous words of one Redditor, “Man, noncompetes used to be so much harsher back then.”
The Sewing Machine War of the 1850s
In the 2010s, amid intense competition, smartphone companies began suing each other for patent infringement, with Samsung, Apple, Google, and Rockstar filing lawsuitsback and forth.
However, this wasn’t the first patent war—the first was around 200 years prior: the sewing machine war of the 1850s. Although the sewing machine is now a complete invention that revolutionized industries and countries, it didn’t start that way.
It wasn’t just one person who invented it by themselves; it was the result of many contributions by different inventors, all of whom received patents on their inventions. The outcome was that each sewing machine produced, sold, and used infringed on multiple patents, which spurred massive litigation by patent owners against all guilty parties.
Elias Howe Jr. was the first person to obtain a U.S. patent for his novel “lockstitch” sewing machine in 1846. The machine was the first to feature a thread feed that remains a crucial component of modern-day sewing machines. Without a ready market in the U.S. for his new invention, Howe and his brother went to England to seek financing. They failed to gain traction and returned to the U.S. in 1849.
At this point, Howe had a patent for a sewing machine; there wasn’t a market for it, and other mechanics were starting to tinker with the concept, producing their own designs. For instance, Isaac Singer patented a bulky sewing machine design in 1851, followed by numerous copycats.
By the mid-1850s, several manufacturers were producing and selling sewing machines under their own patents. At this point, while unsuccessful in his commercialization pursuits, Howe did have the oldest and best patent. So beginning in 1849, he started suing the other companies for patent infringement.
In this way, Howe started the sewing machine war, even though he didn’t make sewing machines. At the time, Howe’s business model was solely licensing his patent to the lockstitch sewing machine manufacturers. As commentators from Slate write:
One historian referred to Howe’s “main occupation” in the early 1850s as “suing the infringers of his patent for royalties.” In short, if Howe were alive today, people would call him a “patent troll,” although it’s more accurate to say that his business model was patent licensing. In fact, Howe’s licensing and litigation practices were only possible because he had the financial backing of a business investor.
During this period, one of Howe’s competitors tried to convince the “original” developer (Walter Hunt) of the sewing machine design (pre-Howe) to come forward and sue Howe for infringement, invalidating his claim as the “first.” Howe ended up winning on a technicality because Hunt, as a “free thinker,” wouldn’t take the required court religious oath (to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help him God”), so the case was thrown out.
After 5 years, Howe won his cases, gaining the right to order the other manufacturers to cease and desist. However, he still couldn’t make a good sewing machine. So, what could he do?
In 1856, Orlando Potter, the President of the Grover and Baker Company, brought together the main sewing machine manufacturers with a proposal. He wanted to create the first “patent pool”, where all of them would congregate their various patents. All of the companies in the pool would be able to manufacture sewing machines, paying licensing fees to everyone else.
These pools are still used today when technological inventions are covered by many overlapping patents as a way to streamline monetization and prevent lengthy petty court battles.
Monopoly Was A Stolen Idea
One night in 1932, Charles Todd, a Philadelphia businessman, and his wife introduced their friends, Charles and Esther Darrow, to a real estate board game they had recently learned. The Darrows liked the game so much that Charles Todd made them a copy and began teaching them more advanced rules.
The game didn’t have an official name, and it wasn’t sold publicly; it was simply passed between friends. Everyone called it “the monopoly game.”
At this point, Darrow was unemployed and desperate for money to support his family. So, he asked Charles Todd to write up a copy of the roles. Following, Darrow went on to distribute the game himself, calling it Monopoly. Within 3 years of his success, Darrow sold the game’s copyrights to the Parker Brothers, eventually making him millions.
Journalists continued to ask him where he got the inspiration to create the game. Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, “It’s a freak, entirely unexpected and illogical.”
Now, most people think Charles Darrow invented Monopoly during the Great Depression and became a millionaire—and that’s the version Hasbro wants you to believe.
In actuality, the game was invented in 1903 by American anti-monopolist Lizzie Magie, who originally called it “The Landlord’s Game.” As The Guardian writes:
To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the income inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s ills with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.
Night after night, after her work at her office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views – that was the whole point of it.
At the time, board games were becoming increasingly common, so Lizzie began developing her design. She devised the game as a way to explain the single-tax theory of the economist Henry George, with the intention of using it as an educational tool to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies.
She patented the first version of the game in 1904. Lizzie created two sets of rules to showcase different scenarios: an anti-monopolist set in which all players were rewarded for creating wealth, and a monopolist set in which the goal was to create monopolies and crush opponents.
After further refining her design, Lizzie patented the game again in 1923. Two years later, she published a version of the game through the Economic Game Company. The game became popular with left-wing intellectuals and college students, eventually finding its way to the home of Charles Todd.
When Parker Brothers bought the copyrights from Darrow, they learned that Darrow was not the sole owner of the game, and there were existing patents in place. As she later recounts, Lizzie wasn’t fully aware of the opportunity she was signing away when she received $500 in exchange for her patent, with no royalties.
A new patent was issued to Charles Darrow in 1935 for the iconic board design, pieces, and coloration. In 1991, Hasbro acquired Parker Bros, creating and licensing many other versions of Monopoly.
Even today, Hasbro downplays Lizzie’s impact on the game’s development, crediting the official Monopoly game to Charles Darrow, and the official history on their website begins in 1935.
The Monopoly story raises the question of who should get credit for an invention and how, as many unnamed and unnoticed inventors like Lizzie go under the radar every day.
The Great Happy Birthday Heist
Did you know that, growing up, when you sang happy birthday (by my quick calculations, that may have been upwards of 250 times), you were likely in violation of intellectual property law? I bet you didn’t know that—and the price can be pretty hefty.
Even in the age of the internet and more vigorous reporting and fact-checking, intellectual property qualms continue.
Originally published in 1893 by Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill (though this fact is disputed in true IP ownership fashion), the Happy Birthday song became internationally recognized over the subsequent century. In 1998, the organizers of the Guinness Book of World Records went as far as to claim it was the most recognized song in the English language.
So, how did this song become extremely controversial in the 21st century (it seems like it’s been a long time since the original inventorship)? Let’s dive deeper into the song’s controversial history.
The combination of the melody and lyrics to “Happy Birthday” was first printed in 1912; it didn’t include any credits or copyright notices. This trend continued for the following decades as the song steadily grew in popularity.
In 1935, the Summy Company registered a copyright for the song, citing the authors as Preston Orem and Mrs. R. R. Forman, and maintained ownership of the intellectual property until the company was purchased in 1988 by Warner/Chappell Music for $25M (the value of the Happy Birthday IP was $5M at the time). With its newfound ownership, Warner stated that unauthorized public performances of the song were prohibited unless the user paid a $700 licensing fee.
In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, extending the rights of copyrights from the life of the author plus 50 years (or 75 years from publication or 100 years after creation) to be the life of the author plus 70 years (95 years from publication or 120 years after creation). As such, Warner claimed that the U.S. copyright would not expire until 2030.
However, some were skeptical about Warner’s ownership rights. Chief among them was American law professor Robert Brauneis. He extensively researched the song’s history and, in 2010, concluded that there was a high likelihood it was no longer under copyright.
In 2013, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Nelson wanted to use the song in a film about its history, but was told she needed to pay royalty fees (around $1,500) to do so. Nelson didn’t want to comply; instead working with Brauneis to develop a lawsuit against Warner, challenging the validity of the copyright claim.
After a two-year legal battle, a federal judge declared the copyright claim was invalid. In 2016, Warner settled for $14M, and the court declared that “Happy Birthday to You” was in the public domain. As the New York Lawyers Association writes:
The court’s decision was a significant win for culture and open access to music. With the recognition of the song’s public domain status, anyone could now use it freely—even in commercial contexts—without paying fees or seeking permissions. The case became a milestone in copyright history, underscoring the importance of balanced protection: ensuring creators are fairly compensated, but not enabling unjust monopolies over widely shared cultural works.
Moreover, the case served as a cautionary tale for other questionable copyright claims, encouraging greater transparency in the management of protected works and discouraging companies from profiting off creations that should belong to the public.
A Not Lame, Captivating History of Intellectual Property
The true, comprehensive history of intellectual property would fill libraries upon libraries of books. It’s incredibly convoluted and nuanced, complete with intricate technical terminology and historical precedents.
The 4 stories above showcase some of the most significant milestones in the history and development of intellectual property rights worldwide.
These tales showcase how assassinations, threats, lawsuits, monopolies, cover-ups, and unabashed greed have shaped the laws, policies, and principles we face today. It’s a classic case of a rule being made for a unique, niche scenario (i.e., this is why there’s a rule against eating crayons in class).
Even if you’re not fully interested in the field, hopefully, you’ve seen that there are parts that can be digestible and interesting for outsiders. If this sparked your interest to learn more, that’s great too!
There are hundreds of these stories out there—this is just the start. It’s my mission to continue sharing the captivating, not-lame narrative of this growing industry, one that is cementing itself as a key player in the 21st-century environment.
That’s a wrap on this deep dive.
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Drew Jackson
Founder & Writer
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