How the Patent Office Helped to End Slavery
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Feb. 8 (Bloomberg) -- It is easy to look to early Americaas a moment of unshackled innovation. Yet in this respect thepre-Civil War period was especially problematic.
Then, intellectual property and human property were dualand dueling pillars of capitalist development, and for a vastswath of the population, invention was stifled under thecrushing weight of slavery.