33. The power of Congress to establish post offices and post roads is not an exclusive power, for the States are not prohibited to legislate on the same subject. But Congress has unlimited power over it and may designate what may be included in and what may be excluded from the mails. This exercise is doubtless of the police power. It does not follow that congressional establishing and regulation of post offices and post roads mean that Congress has power to deal with crime or immorality within a State in order to maintain that it possesses the power to forbid the use of the mails in aid of the perpetration of crime and immorality. So a postal law of Congress excluding lottery tickets from the mail is not an abridgment of the freedom of the press. Congress, by reason of the nature of its functions, is empowered to determine what shall and what shall not be carried in the mails, and the right of freedom of speech does not give the right to injure the objects or to defeat the purposes which government is ordained and established to further and protect.[80] But the State, in exercise of its police power, may undoubtedly protect its citizens from injury springing out of that intercourse known as the mail service so long as it is wholly intrastate,—that is, within its jurisdiction. 34. Copyrights and patent rights are privileges granted by Congress for a term of years and are strictly statutory—for the United States has no common law. The States may exercise their powers in like manner, subject to the essential condition that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Copyrights and patent rights are examples of rights which exist by act of Congress,[81] but the right thus created does not annul the ordinary police power as put forth in the police regulations of a State. The person owning or controlling either copyright or patent right is not thereby empowered to defy the laws of a State as respecting the sale of the article in which or over which he has the exclusive right. The article itself may be adjudged injurious to the public and, therefore, by police regulation, forbidden to be sold or to be exposed for sale in the State. The patent right prevents others than the inventor from participating in the fruits of his invention, without his consent; but the exercise of the right must be in subordination to the police regulations of the State, otherwise, “a person might with as much propriety claim a right to commit murder with an instrument, because he held a patent for a new and useful invention.”[82] It may be accepted as a principle that “patent laws do not interfere with the power of a State to pass laws for the protection and security of its citizens, in their persons and property, or in respect to matters of internal polity, although such laws may incidentally affect the profitable use or sale by a patentee of his inventions.”[83]