From Privilege to Patent
Invention and printing privileges in Venice, England and the Dutch Republic before modern patents, counted one grant at a time
Before modern patent and copyright law, no statute gave anyone the sole right to build a new machine or print a new book. The Venetian Senate, the English Crown and the Dutch States General granted that right one petitioner at a time; the grant was a privilege. The grants left documents, and nineteenth-century archivists bound them into lists.
This site counts those lists one grant at a time. For England: Hulme's 55 grants of 1561–1603, Woodcroft's numbers 1 to 14,359 for 1617–1852, and 10,453 entries in the London Stationers' Register for 1557–1640. For Venice: the 256 printing documents of 1469–1526 collected by Fulin. For the Dutch Republic: 241 privilege documents of 1581–1621 from the data of Buning and Looijesteijn. Venetian invention patents could not be counted here; figures from the literature are shown as secondary.
Four questions run through the metrics: how many grants were made each year, in which trades, to whom (foreigners, grants shared by several people), and for how long and on what terms. One change these counts show is the term written in English grants moving from 21 years to 14 around the Statute of Monopolies of 1624.
Every figure carries its unit and its source. The lists count in different units (patent numbers, grants, register entries, documents), so jurisdictions cannot be compared as they stand. Each metric page also has a reliability card, the agreement found when another reader went back to the page images or the original text, and its caveats. The site does not say what a law changed; it reports what is observed before and after a given year.
To start, read the key points below and the A metrics. By country, open Jurisdictions; for dates, Timeline; for a narrative without tables, the Reading edition. The counting rules are under Method and limits, and the sources and code under Data.
Mean grants per year were 3.9 in 1617–1623 and 3.6 in 1625–1631, with overlapping 95% intervals. Of the terms written in the entries, 18 of 27 in 1617–1623 are 21 years, and 93 of 96 in 1625–1640 are 14 years or less.
Of the 329 stated terms in 1625–1700, 324 are 14 years or less; 4 are still 21 years (1631, 1632, 1638, 1663).
The share of English grants with a foreign link ('communication' or an address abroad) is 2.5% in the 18th century and 21.6% in 1840–1852. Hulme counts 21 of 55 grants of 1561–1603 (four of them grants for regulating trade) as grants to aliens. In the Dutch Republic 18% of privilege documents of 1581–1621 name a grantee of known foreign origin, 23% if grantees of probable foreign extraction are included.
Entries marked reassigned are 1.7% in the 1580s and 10.4% in the 1620s; shared entries are 13.6% in the 1630s.
In Fulin's documents there are 240 printing privileges in 1492–1526, 73 (30%) of them to authors, editors or translators. By five-year period the most are in 1495–1499 (61) and the fewest in 1510–1514 (16).