At Davos, Trump is back to threatening our allies with tariffs
Just another btw: Until about 100 years ago the US was a great believer in in not protecting inventors. I don't think any other country in the 19th century "stole" so much "intellectual property" as the US. Strange that is always those who are technologically behind that think protection is bullshit (or theft), and always those ahead think that protection is God's Order.
Wait, does this mean that if I look up patents, they'll all begin in the 1910's? Can you go into more detail about how you concluded this?
Having a patent system != respecting other country's systems or inventors.
And anyway, in the time of books, we are talking about illegal book printings (= knowledge) here. The US was the biggest piracy printer in the 19th century.
Ready for a very short history on copyright?
Catholic France('s church) once banned book printing to prevent anti-katholic books from printing. Just owning one of the new things called printing press would cost you your head.
The result? A boom in Germany's Rhein-area printing industry and French smugglers developing a taste for books.
And then, when even the death penalty was not harsh enough to sucessfully censor books, England's queen Anne invented the copyright to use a monopoly to outsource censoring.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_AnneAnd half a century later, the founding fathers of the USA, having experienced the results of that copyright thing, had a big fight over copyright - if it should exist or outright banned.
They compromised on the constitutian's formula that there can be a copyright "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause), That goal-clause was (after already vamporized in reality) effectivly made obsolete by the Sonny Bono copyright term extension act (better known as Mickey Mouse act, linked in the WP entry above), thanks to which Sonny Bono got a star on the walk of fame and the rest of the world 20 years of vanished books.