Conversely, there are provisions which may have been in the draught presented to the Convention, but which are not in the draught filed in the State Department. The most notable of these is the one relating to patents and copyright. Pinckney says in the Observations "There is also an authority to the national legislature" "to secure to authors the exclusive right to their performances and discoveries;" and on the 18th of August he moved in the Convention to insert among other powers "To grant patents for useful inventions."
If the provision was in the original draught, the Committee of Detail were not authorized to adopt it and did not; but the Convention did and it became a part of the Constitution. Pinckney was constantly nursing his draught, revising, amending, rearranging, and it is not improbable that he inserted this provision in one copy and neglected to insert it in the others. But he certainty seems to have been the author of it. From one point of view it may seem a needless Constitutional provision; for a national legislature could so legislate without it. But under the British Constitution monopolies were a prerogative of the Crown, and a patent was deemed a monopoly. Pinckney therefore did wisely in expressly assigning patent-rights and copyrights to the legislative branch of the Government, giving to the mind-work of the inventor or author the character of property and the safeguard of the law.
Another provision is the compromise relating to slave representation. In the State Department draught it is provided that the number of the delegates shall be regulated "by the number of inhabitants" (Art. 3) and that "the proportion of direct taxation shall be regulated by the whole number of inhabitants of every description." In the Observations he says that his plan contains a provision "for empowering Congress to levy taxes upon the States, agreeable to the rule now in use, an enumeration of the white inhabitants, and three-fifths of other descriptions." In the Convention on the 12th of July, "Mr. Pinckney moved to amend Mr. Randolph's motion so as to make 'blacks equal to the whites in the ratio of representation.' This he urged was nothing more than justice. The blacks are the labourers, the peasants of the Southern States: they are as productive of pecuniary resources as those of the Northern States. They add equally to the wealth, and, considering money as the sinews of war, to the strength of the nation. It will also be politic with regard to the Northern States, as taxation is to keep pace with Representation."