Thomas Jefferson on patents: _
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for
the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his
condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by
nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space,
without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which
we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement
or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a
subject of property._