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 of open-content licenses by analogy to the abandonment provisions of the Patent Act.

B. Patent Abandonment and the Copyright Act
The first person who “invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor,” so long as the invention is useful, novel, and nonobvious, and so long as none of a series of statutory exceptions bars the issuance of the patent.

Although inventors may patent their discoveries, they are not obliged to do so. Nearly two centuries ago, the Supreme Court recognized an inventor’s right to “abandon his invention, and surrender or dedicate it to the public.” This right also has been expressly recognized in the patent statutes continuously since 1839. It is recognized today in § 102(c), which bars an award of patent if the inventor “has abandoned the invention.” The touchstone under § 102(c) is whether the inventor clearly intended to dedicate the invention to the public. Thus, under the Patent Act, inventors may expressly relinquish rights in their inventions for the benefit of the public—either expressly under § 102(c) or by taking any of the other actions that the statute specifies as barring patentability. The result in either case is that the invention enters the public domain and may not thereafter be patented.

Given that the Patent Act and the Copyright Act are two different statutes, the presence of clear avenues of abandonment in the one may not necessarily say much about the apparent lack of similar provisions in the other. On multiple occasions, however, the Supreme Court has suggested that the