From a posting on Dale B. Halling’s blog State of Innovation at http://hallingblog.com/thomas-jefferson-on-patents/

Thomas Jefferson on Patents
“The fact is that one new idea leads to another, that to a third, and so on through a course of time until someone, with whom no one of these ideas was original, combines all together, and produces what is justly called a new invention.”
– Thomas Jefferson, Director of the 1st U.S. Patent Board –

1 Comment »
1.And Jefferson should know, because he made a bunch of them, as anyone who’s visited Monticello would know.

On another Jefferson perspective, see David Post’s book “In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace” http://ow.ly/hces. It takes off from Jefferson’s confronting a vast new territory and figuring out how to incorporate it into a new nation, and thinks about cyberspace analogously. David teaches at the Temple University School of Law in Philadelphia, home of the Liberty Bell.

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Comment by Gerry Elman | July 13, 2009