W 82-95. Copyright registrations, by type, 1870-1970.

Source: Series W 82-91, W 93–95, U.S. Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress and Annual Report of the Register of Copyrights, various issues. Series W 92, U.S. Patent Office, 1874-1896, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents; 1897-1940, unpublished data; 1941-1970, U.S. Library of Congress, Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress, various issues.

Additional detail for some series is shown in the source volumes. Figures are on a calendar-year basis for 1870–1896, and on a fiscalyear basis thereafter. Prior to 1870, copyright claims were entered at Federal District Courts. For additional information on this period, see Martin A. Roberts, Records in the Copyright Office Deposited by the United States District Courts Covering the Period 17901870, Washington, D.C., 1939.

The term "copyright" may be defined as the right to prevent copying. It has come to mean that body of exclusive rights granted by Federal statute to authors for the protection of their writings. It includes the exclusive right to print, reprint, publish, copy, and vend the copyrighted work; to make other versions of the work; and, with certain limitations, to make recordings of the work and to perform the work in public. The Copyright Office is primarily an office of record, and registers claims if the provisions of the law and the regulations have been complied with. A certificate is issued to the applicant upon completion of each registration.

The first law, 1790, applied only to maps, charts, and books. Subsequent amendments provided for prints (1802); musical compositions (1831); dramatic compositions with the right of public performance (1856); photographs (1865); paintings, drawings, sculpture, and models or designs for works of the fine arts (1870); performance rights in music (1897); motion pictures and photoplays (1912); and performance rights in nondramatic literary works (1952). The original term of copyright was 14 years, with the privilege of renewal for 14 years. In 1831, the first term was increased to 28 years, and in 1909, the renewal term was also increased to 28 years. Before 1891, only citizens or residents of the United States could obtain copyrights. The Act of 1891 extended the privilege to citizens of countries with which the United States had reciprocal copyright agreements. Claims in works by citizens of States adhering to international copyright conventions to which the United States is a party (Mexico City, 1902; Buenos Aires, 1910; and Universal Copyright Convention, 1952) may also be registered, as well as works first published in States adhering to the Universal Copyright Convention.

Detailed information on the various classes of works may be obtained by writing to the Register of Copyrights, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540.

W 82, total registrations. For 1870-1940, the figures shown in this series exclude commercial prints and labels; see text for series W 92, below.

W 83-85, books, pamphlets, and periodicals. Serial publications issued at regular intervals of less than a year are considered periodicals; otherwise, they are considered books.

W 87, dramatic or dramatico-musical compositions. For 1909 and earlier years, this series pertains only to dramatic compositions. W 92, commercial prints and labels. Registration of commercial prints and labels in the Patent Office was first authorized by the Act of June 18, 1874. Jurisdiction was transferred to the Register of Copyrights by Public Law 244, 53 Stat. 1142, effective June 30, 1940.

W 94, miscellaneous. Includes lectures, sermons, addresses; reproductions of works of art; drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character; and photographs.

W 96-106. General note.

A patent is a grant by the Government to the inventor, his heirs or assigns, of the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the invention patented. Patents can be obtained for any new and useful machine, manufacture, composition of matter or process, or any new and useful improvement thereof, subject to the requirements and conditions of the law, United States Code, Title 35, Patents. An invention is "useful" if it has lawful purpose and is operative. Since 1946, inventions useful solely in the utilization of fissionable material or atomic energy for atomic weapons have been unpatentable. If the subject matter patented can be used without infringement of the prior rights of others or violation of any applicable statute, the patent, in effect, gives its owner the exclusive right to make, use, or sell the subject of the patent. The subject matter covered by a patent must be sufficiently new as to be not obvious to one skilled in the art to which it relates.

Patents on inventions have been issued by the Federal Government since April 10, 1790. Both the fees charged and the term of patents have been changed occasionally by law. A total fee of $30 was charged on application in 1793; now (1973) a base fee of $65 is charged. Whereas no charge was made prior to 1861 when a patent was granted, modern-day applicants pay an additional minimum fee of $110 at that time. Other smaller fees incidental to the processing of applications may also be charged by the Patent Office.

For 1790-1861, the term of a patent was 14 years. From 1836 until the patents granted in 1861 expired, patents could be extended for an additional 7 years upon application by the patentee and approval of a special board or the Commissioner. About 5 percent of the patents issued during the latter part of this period were extended in this manner. Since 1861, the term of patents on inventions has been fixed at 17 years with extensions possible only by special act of Congress. The number of such extensions has been negligible. From February 21, 1793, to July 4, 1836, patents were granted on demand of the applicant, upon compliance with the formal requirements, without examination as to novelty and other requirements. Consequently, statistics of patents on inventions issued during this period are more comparable to subsequent statistics of applications for patents on inventions (series W 96) than to subsequent statistics of patents on inventions. Different sources for patent statistics during this period show minor discrepancies.

Since July 4, 1836, the Patent Office has examined applications for novelty and for compliance with the requirements of the statute and not all applications which are filed become patents. See Department of Commerce, The Story of the United States Patent Office, for a brief account of the development of the patent laws; and General Information Concerning Patents (revised periodically), for an outline of the patent law.

Other kinds of patents issued are design patents, botanical plant patents, and reissued patents. Reissued patents are patents which are issued to replace another patent to correct some error, and hence have no significance in most uses of patent statistics. They are not shown in this compilation, although reissue applications are included in series W 96 for some years for which they could not be separated. Reissued patents were numbered separately from 1838; the number of the first such patent issued in 1972 is 27,264.

Statistics on various phases of patents on invention are available in various sources. Analyses of aggregate patent statistics appear in Barkev S. Sanders, "The Course of Invention," Journal of the Patent Office Society, October 1936; Joseph Rossman and Barkev Sanders, "The Patent Utilization Study," The Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Journal, June 1957; Alfred B. Stafford, Trends of Inven

tion in Material Culture, Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1950; Alfred B. Stafford, "Is the Rate of Invention Declining?" American Journal of Sociology, May 1952; Jacob Schmookler, Invention and Economic Growth, Harvard University Press, 1966. Statistics of patents issued by industry or by field of technology appear in Simon Kuznets, Secular Movements in Production and Prices, Boston, 1930; R. K. Merton, "Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention," Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1935; Trends of Invention in Material Culture, cited above; and Invention and Economic Growth, cited above. The basic data used in this work, two volumes bound in one, are on file in the Library of the U.S. Patent Office under the title "Statistics of Patents Classified by Industry, United States, 18371957".

Statistics of patents issued by State and country of residence of the inventor appear in the Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, and in the Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States. Since 1966, the annual reports have also included applications filed by country of residence, beginning with calendar year 1961.

International patent statistics are given in P. J. Federico, “Historical Patent Statistics, 1791-1961," Journal of the Patent Office Society, vol. 46, Feb. 1964, pages 89-171, which also contains a description of the sources of the statistics for various countries, including the United States. The English Language International Periodical Industrial Property (World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva), published since 1960, has an annual statistical supplement in each December issue, which gives data for a large number of countries including, for many, applications filed by and patents granted to residents of other countries, and additional statistics for the United States.

W 96-98. Patent applications filed on inventions, designs, and botanical plants, 1836-1970.

Source: U.S. Patent Office, 1836-1839, The Story of the United States Patent Office, 1790-1956; 1840-1925, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents; 1926-1970, unpublished data.

Series W 96 involves a slight element of double counting prior to 1940. Before a change in the law on August 5, 1939, made it impossible, an applicant could permit his initial application to lapse and then file a new application covering the same invention. Possibly 2 to 4 percent of the applications filed before 1940 were of this character. For years prior to 1880, series W 96 includes design applications, and for years prior to 1877, also includes reissue applications.

W 99. Total patents issued on inventions, 1790-1970.

Source: 1790-1925, U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents; 1926-1970, unpublished data.

Patents for inventions are numbered serially, the number of the first patent issued in 1972 being 3,631,539. This numbering system, although instituted later, began with the first patent issued after the Patent Act of July 4, 1836. Most sources of patent statistics give, as the annual number of patents issued, the numbers derived by subtracting the serial numbers of the first patent in each year. However, some serial numbers were not used and are blank; that is, there may not be any patent corresponding to a particular number. This may arise when an application scheduled to be patented, with the patent number assigned, is withdrawn for some reason at a time when it is too late to assign that number to some other case. The blank numbers averaged 26 per year for 1939-1955, but only 7.5 per year for 1961-1970. Beginning with the 1970 edition, the Annual Patent Index includes a listing of the blank numbers, for the period 1920-1970. Through 1971 there were 2,998 blank numbers. In the present series the number of blank numbers has been deducted in each year for which it could be ascertained. Therefore, the statistics of patents on inventions issued since 1836 may run a fraction of a percent below those appearing in some issues of the Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents and in Historical Statistics of the United

States, 1789-1945. Reissued patents are not shown in this compilation.

Patents granted in a given year cannot be compared with applications filed in the same year since there is a variable lag between the time of applying and the time of issuing a patent. During the last 10 years this lag varied between 2 years and 6 months and 3 years and 3 months as the average time for issuing patents. In addition, variations in the number of patents issued in a given year may be due to administrative problems such as the loss or addition of examining personnel, or rearrangement of printing schedules.

W 100-103. Patents on inventions issued to individuals, to U.S. and foreign corporations, and to the U.S. Government, 1901-1970. Source: 1901-1935, U.S. Patent Office, unpublished data; 19361955, P. J. Federico, Distribution of Patents Issued to Corporations, 1939-1955, Washington, D.C., 1957, Study No. 3, table 6 (a report prepared for the Senate Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights); 1956-1970, U.S. Patent Office, unpublished data.

Statistics on patents issued to U.S. and foreign corporations are actual counts for 1931-1937, 1955, and 1961-1970; for the other years they are estimates based on samples. Statistics of patents issued to the U.S. Government are based on actual count. This figure does not include patents issued to the Alien Property Custodian during and after World War II. Patents assigned after grant are not included. The patents issued to individuals are obtained by subtraction from the total.

W 104. Patents issued on designs, 1842-1970.

Source: U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, and unpublished data.

Designs became patentable in 1842 and relate to the appearance, not to the structure or use, of articles of manufacture. The term for design patents was initially set at 7 years. Since 1861, the term has been 31⁄2, 7, or 14 years, at the discretion of the applicant. Fees payable vary with the term. Design patents are numbered separately. The number of the first design patent issued in 1972 is 222,801.

W 105. Patents issued on botanical plants, 1931-1970.
Source: U.S. Patent Office, unpublished data.

Botanical plants became subject to patents for the first time in 1930. Patentable plants are those which are asexually reproduced— distinct and new varieties of plants other than tuber-propagated plants. The term and fees for plant patents are the same as for patents on inventions. Plant patents are numbered separately from the other patents. The number of the first plant patent issued in 1972 is 3,063.

W 106. Patents issued to residents of foreign countries, 1836-1970. Source: U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, and unpublished data.

The volume of patents issued to citizens of foreign countries was influenced in the early years of the patent system by discriminatory legislation. For 1800-1836, only aliens who had resided in the United States for 2 years and who had declared their intention of becoming citizens could apply for U.S. patents. For 1836-1861, aliens paid higher fees than citizens on a theory of reciprocity. Discrimination based on nationality was eliminated in 1861.

This series is based on residence and not on citizenship. It includes patents on inventions, designs, and botanical plants. Separate statistics on components are not available except for recent years. For the 7 years 1951-1957, foreign residents received 12.6 percent of invention patents, 3.3 percent of design patents, and 12.5 percent of the plant patents. For the period 1964-1970, foreign residents received 22.4 percent of invention patents, 7.0 percent of design patents, and 13.5 percent of the plant patents.

W 107-108 and W 82-95

W 107-108. Trademarks registered and renewed, 1870-1970.

Source: U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents, and unpublished data.

A trademark is a symbol-a picture, word, or phrase-applied by a manufacturer or merchant to distinguish his goods from those of others. Trademark rights are acquired by adoption of a mark and use of it on the goods in trade. The Federal law provides for the registration in the Patent Office of such marks which are used in interstate and foreign commerce. Applications for registration are examined and registration may be refused if the mark is of a characterprohibited registration (national emblems, deceptive marks, purely descriptive marks, etc.) or if it conflicts with a prior registered mark. Federal registration does not create ownership, but only gives additional advantages to the owner. See Department of Commerce, General Information Concerning Trademarks, (revised periodically), for an outline of the requirements for registering a trademark. The first Federal trademark law, that of 1870, was based on the

patent and copyright clause of the Constitution instead of the interstate and foreign commerce clause, and was held unconstitutional in 1879. The Trademark Act of 1881 was limited to marks used in foreign commerce. The Act of 1905 included marks used in interstate commerce as well. An Act of 1920 permitted registration of a secondary class of marks not previously registrable. A completely new Act of 1946, effective 1947, provides for a Principal Register on which marks of the type registrable under the Acts of 1881 and 1905 could be registered, and a Supplemental Register on which marks of the type registrable under the Act of 1920 could be registered. Registrations under the Act of 1946 are for a term of 20 years, with renewal possible for successive 20-year terms. Registrations issued under the Acts of 1881 and 1905 remain in force for their unexpired terms and may be renewed in the same manner as registrations under the Act of 1946. Registrations under the Act of 1920 cannot be renewed unless renewal is required to support a Foreign Registration and in such case may be renewed on the Supplemental Register in the same manner as registrations under the Act of 1946.