Page "Intellectual property" Paragraph 3

Modern usage of the term intellectual property goes back at least as far as 1867 with the founding of the North German Confederation whose constitution granted legislative power over the protection of intellectual property ( Schutz des geistigen Eigentums ) to the confederation.

When the administrative secretariats established by the Paris Convention ( 1883 ) and the Berne Convention ( 1886 ) merged in 1893, they located in Berne, and also adopted the term intellectual property in their new combined title, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property.

The organisation subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960, and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization ( WIPO ) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations.

According to Lemley, it was only at this point that the term really began to be used in the United States ( which had not been a party to the Berne Convention ), and it did not enter popular usage until passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980.