(From http://news.openflows.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/09/1539235&mode=thread
   no longer available.)
The Framers of our Constitution viewed inventions and expression 
not as "property", but as public goods to which exclusive rights 
may be granted purely as a means of incenting production. 

Thomas Jefferson expressed the then-dominant view with characteristic 
felicity in an 1813 letter: 


    If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than
    all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the
    thinking power called an idea, which an individual may 
    exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; 
    but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the 
    possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess 
    himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one 
    possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. 
    He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself 
    without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, 
    receives light without darkening me.
    
    http://www.movingtofreedom.org/2006/10/06/thomas-jefferson-on-patents-and-freedom-of-ideas/

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