(a) Patent Rights. In the great parliamentary Statute of 21 James I, which declared the exclusive privileges to use any and to sell any merchandise to be contrary to the ancient and fundamental laws of the realm, and all grants and dispensations for such monopolies to be of none effect, two exceptions had been made; the first, in favor of Patents for fourteen years to the true and first inventors of new manufactures within the realm; and the second, in favor of the grants by Act of Parliament to any Company for the enlargement of foreign Trade, of which the East India Company chartered on the last day of the last year of the sixteenth century became the most famous and the longest-lived. Open letters or letters _patent_, as they were called, giving to inventors exclusive authority to vend for a limited time any chattel or article of commerce, of which a _model_ could be made showing the point and application of what was claimed to be _new_; and Copyrights, which grant an exclusive property also for a limited time to authors and discoverers of something new and useful, of which a model cannot be made, or, as it is phrased in the Constitution of the United States, "_the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries_"; are a part of the results among all English-speaking peoples of the two exceptions in this famous and beneficent Act of Parliament. In the United States a patent lasts for 17 years, and is not reissued except by a special act of Congress; a copyright lasts for 28 years, and may be renewed by the author, his widow, or children, for 14 years longer. In the constitution of the new German Empire of 1871, this protection of intellectual property (_der Schutz des geistigen Eigenthums_) is expressly included in the matters which are to be dealt with by the _Reichstag_ or imperial parliament.