[MUSIC] I'm Paul Heald, a corman research professor at the University of Illinois College of Law where I teach international Intellectual property law, copyright, patent law, international business transactions, and all sorts of other things. A weird but I think good place to start any discussion of patent law goes all the way back to the 17th century when Parliament passed a law against monopolies. Shutting down the Crown's deleterious practice of selling and handing out monopolies in things like soap and how to make glass and the selling of playing cards. But there was one exception to this statute which allowed for the granting of patents to people. Who invented new methods or new machines or in fact who brought them from foreign countries if they hadn't yet found their way into the United Kingdom. And so from the very beginning you can see this recognition that monopolies are really bad but we want to maintain some sort of incentive for creators to invent and to reward them for their Invention. We see this I think manifested in the US Constitution in the intellectual property clause which reads. To promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries. This is the power that's granted to Congress. And interestingly, the word useful arts refers to patents and the word discoveries refers to patents. The word science actually emit knowledge back in the day and actually refer to the copyright power. And you can see in the Preamble to promote the progress of science that the Framers were aware that just simply granting a monopoly might have some negative effects. And it was only worth potentially imposing that cost on the public if there was going to be some sort of countervailing incentive benefit. So what you see really is kind of early economic analysis of law by even the framers or the constitution has carried on to the present day through court decisions and through congressional enactments. This conscious balancing of monopoly cost, which usually are diminished access, diminished supply, higher prices as we all know from buying patented drugs. And then the potentially offsetting benefits of incentives to create, incentives to disclose. In order to get a patent we'll learn that you have to enable someone skilled in the art to be able to make it in your specifications. So you have to disclose fully your invention. And there may in fact also be some advantages associated with eye coordination function that a patent owner might have. And having the exclusive ability to exploit the invention, thereby sort of coordinate financing and distribution. I'll add though that the best guess of economists is that over 95% of all patents come from no market advantage whatsoever. In other words, most patents are completely worthless. And we'll see hopefully, by the end of this course why that might be.