>When did the term, intellectual property, first appear?
In the fundamental case in the law of copyright, _Donaldson v. Beckett_ in the House of Lords in 1774, Justice Ashurst (arguing for common-law copyright, which the House of Lords disallowed), according to the report in Cobbett some 40 years later, came within a hairsbreadth of putting the words together:
"Making an author's intellectual ideas common, was, he observed, giving the purchaser an opportunity of using those ideas, and profiting by them, while they instructed and entertained him; but he could not conceive that the vender, for the price of 5s., sold the purchaser a right to multiply copies, and so get 500£. Literary property was to be defined and described as well as other matters, and matters which were tangible. Every thing was property that was capable of being known or defined, capable of a separate enjoyment, and of value to the owner. Literary property fell within the terms of this definition."
17 Cobbett’s Parl. Hist. at 1002.
john mage