Various

“ Here again we believe the learned economist is in error; he seems to imagine one inventor arriving at perfection either at a jump, or after many attempts—one inventor giving us at once our ocean steamer, or a spinning-mill with a hundred thousand spindles! Inventions go more slowly; when they spring from the brain of the thinker, they are only sketches, and no man in his senses will risk a large capital before making many trials, and that only on a small scale. We do not believe there has been a single invention which, after numerous trials, has not been modified, improved, and perfected. ”

“ I am not prepared to say whether or not inventors should be remunerated by the State; but, after mature consideration, I have come to the conclusion that, in the interests of the nation and of all engaged in industry, Patents for invention should be abolished. A Patent is a monopoly, a patentee a monopolist. When the Protectionist system was in vogue, Patents which were in full harmony with that system could be justified; but in these days of Free-trade all monopolies which act in restraint of trade should be abolished. ”

“ If it were practicable to discriminate between true and sham discoverers, and to ascertain with accuracy to whom the merit of every new invention really belonged, and if it were at the same time easy to secure to the man who increased the common stock of useful knowledge the fruit of his own brain, no one would dream of questioning the moral claim of an inventor to this peculiar kind of property, any more than we now question the justice of giving to an author a copyright in his own work. ”

“ One of the most common arguments in favour of Patents is, that they are necessary to protect the poor inventor, but it is manufacturers and capitalists, and not working men, who make great profits by Patents, and that, too, in a degree which has no reference either to the merit of the inventor or the importance of the invention. One rarely hears of a working man making a good thing of a Patent. If he hits upon a good idea he has seldom the means of developing it to a marketable form, and he generally sells it for a trifle to a capitalist, who brings it to maturity and profits by it. ”

“ Man has invented from the time he began to think and compare, and he will continue to invent while he exists on this planet. Invention is nothing else than thought.
If, as M. le Hardy de Beaulieu says—but which we doubt—there be no fear that property in invention allows the inventor to exact for his services a higher price than they are worth, neither need it be feared that the absence of this right of property would hinder the inventor from obtaining by his discovery all the profit which he has a right to expect from it. ”

“ There seems no good reason why the ideas of inventors should be especially favoured. An invention is a means to a special end, and should be recompensed by him who has the end in view. If any ideas deserve a public recompense, it is those general ideas whose application is of universal utility. But Patent-Law ignores the discoverer of general ideas, and while conferring rewards, at the expense of the community, on empty schemers and puffing tradesmen, it passes over the services of a Newton or an Adam Smith. ”

“ I believe in the possibility and advisableness of presenting, as a substitute for Patents, a system of rewards which will reconcile the honour and interests of men of science and those of practical men, the interests of the master and those of his workmen, the interests of the many and those of the few. Such a system, while entirely emancipating commerce and industry, must, as its condition, deal out its rewards more equitably than the Patent system does, and with more regard to the just claims of inventors. ”

“ The capitalist is the natural ally of the inventor, whom it is his interest to employ and encourage. It is a chief part of the business of every producer to search out every one who can help him to improved methods of production; and the remuneration which, in one shape or another, it is the interest of the capitalist to offer to the really clever inventor, will always form a surer and more substantial reward than the delusive privilege of a legal monopoly. ”

“ Nothing, I think, can be more monstrous than that so grave a matter as a monopoly should be granted to any person for anything without inquiry either as to private merit or public policy—in fact, merely for the asking and the paying. Amongst other evils of this indiscriminate system is that the majority of Patents granted are bad, and yet such is the dread of litigation, that people submit to a Patent they know to be bad rather than involve themselves in the trouble and expense of resisting it. ”

“ Tant qu’elle n’est pas intervenue, tant que celui qui a utilisé un agent naturel est maître de son secret, son agent naturel est gratuit sans doute, mais il n’est pas encore commun; la conquête est réalisée, mais elle l’est au profit d’un seul homme ou d’une seule classe. Elle n’est pas encore un bienfait pour l’humanité entière. Si les choses devaient rester ainsi avec toute invention, un principe d’inégalité indéfinie s’introduirait dans le monde ”

“ It is not, like the ordinary law of property, based on an universal intuition of the human conscience, but it is one of those laws by which unwise legislators have striven so long and so vainly to give an artificial stimulus to human industry. Hence the arbitrary nature of its enactments. The ordinary right of property is unlimited in its duration—passing from generation to generation. But common sense revolts, instinctively, against a perpetual monopoly of thought. ”

“ Would it not be more reasonable to acknowledge that if the learned law-makers of the numerous countries in which the principle of property in inventions has been adopted have not been able to frame laws capable of protecting the rights of pretended proprietors conjointly with those of individuals and society at large, it is because the principle is radically wrong, and contrary to the general interests of mankind? The law-giver finds an obstacle at every side in legitimate scruples; he fears to give too much, and he fears to take too much. ”

“ We do not go so far as M. Walkoff; we do not affirm that the impossibility of matter being subject at one time to more than one will is the first cause of property; but we say it is the distinctive character of property, and, like him, we cannot see a subject, for property is a shape, plan, or system, which, to see once, as in a spade, the wheel, the corkscrew, is to possess an indelible idea. ”

“ It has always seemed to me that the weakness of the inventor’s case lies in the fact already alluded to, that he rarely is the sole inventor. Hence the fundamental distinction between Invention and Copyright, though I am no fanatical admirer of the latter privilege.
Now, if a law can confer a right on one person only by inflicting a wrong on a number of other persons, it is intrinsically vicious, and cannot be defended on the ground of its intentional goodness. ”

“ Generally speaking, the anticipation of a profitable use to be made of an invention for one’s exclusive benefit is, no doubt, a powerful incitement for the inventive genius, and equally is it admitted that to temporary Patent-right we owe the successive improvements on many a useful invention.
Experience has, however, taught that in most instances Patents do not fulfil their mission; that on the whole they have not proved an actual benefit, [191] either to the proprietor or the public; that the profits have gone just as often into the pockets of strangers as into those of the able inventor. ”

“ And it speaks of fair trade—fairness is about as important as freedom. Will anybody say it is fair to tax one manufacturer and let another go free? Yet this is what Patents do. Those whom the patentee favours, or fears, or forgets, he does not tax, or taxes lightly, while on others he lays a heavy hand. But, worst of all, under the open competition to which the British manufacturer is now exposed with all the world, he often has to pay heavy Patent fees—often four, and sometimes, as I know, five, and even six, figures deep—while his foreign rivals wholly escape. ”

“ Also, when we see the defenders of property in invention draw a sad picture of the piercing miseries which inventors of these last have had to endure, we are always tempted to ask them to show us the pitiful account of ruin caused among those who placed faith in their promises and delusions. Every medal has its reverse, and if more than one real inventor has been misunderstood, many of the too-confident have been victims of the mad and inapplicable ideas of inventors who imagined themselves men of genius. ”

“ But I appeal with equal directness to philanthropists, especially all those who have the power of representing to their fellows what a folly and mistake it is to write books with a view to the moral, social, and religious welfare of men, and yet to rest satisfied with a system of law and trade that find the recompenses of authorship and of publishing ventures in a limited sale of dear books instead of an extensive sale of cheap ones—of a few good books at a large profit instead of many good books at a small! ”

“ I would not for one moment deny that instances could be named in which the absence of a Patent-Law might have proved a hardship to a real inventor, but I feel quite satisfied in my own mind that whatever may hitherto have been the case, the time has now fully arrived when infinitely less injustice would, upon the whole, be occasioned by the absence of all Patent-Laws than by the best Patent-Law that could be devised. ”

“ Practice, experience, which is the supreme authority in the world, shows daily, in France particularly, that the system is a scourge to industry. What might be substituted is a system of recompenses, either national or European, as you have proposed, to be awarded when practical use has pronounced on the merit of each invention, and when the originality shall admit of being established. All the friends of industrial and social progress ought to unite their efforts to liberate industry from the shackles that have been bequeathed from the past. ”

“ You wish to encourage inventions, by which the wealth of the world is so much increased, and you therefore promise inventors a temporary monopoly of their use, on the single condition that the inventions shall be made public. But for some such guarantee, it is said, many inventors would have no temptation to rack their brains, and capitalists would be afraid to help them in putting their ideas into a complete shape. That invention, as a matter of fact, is to some extent encouraged, is certain, though Lord Stanley hardly touched upon the point. ”

“ What the law does is to lay hold of the most profitable mode of using the idea, and say that for a limited time no one but the originator shall be at liberty, in the one case, to print the book or a colourable imitation of it; or, in the other, to manufacture or use the machine or any colourable imitation of that. It is impossible, we think, to deny the abstract right of a real author or inventor, and more palpably impossible to deny it in the one case while you admit it in the other. ”

“ Against the stimulating influence of monopoly upon individuals, we must, however, in a period so extremely favourable to industrial progress, not underrate the very important point, that it also checks the quick and fertile development of a new thought, which, when totally free, might be expected to spring up in a higher degree from the competing labours of all. Of course, it is impossible to say whether in England, Belgium, France, and the United States, industry, if supported by other favourable stipulations, might not have taken an equal development without the protection of Patents ”

“ The inventor of a useful discovery has quite as much, or more, chance of making a fortune as the manufacturer who confines himself to the beaten tracks, and only employs the known methods; this last has had quite as much risk of being ruined as any searcher after discovery. We believe that they are on an equality as to position; for if the inventor may be ruined in not finding what he seeks, the manufacturer may see all his looms or his machines rendered useless, all his outlets closed, by the introduction of a cheaper means of production. ”

“ To inventions in the domain of the useful arts, processes and operations do not carry the stamp of personality, which is the glory of the artist and author, and which of itself constitutes a protection equal to that which protects right of property.
The invention is something impersonal, like a service rendered and returned, which is not exchanged or paid by services of equivalent weight and description. ”

“ The fear that with abolition of Patents the ingenuity of mankind would slacken, we cannot share, because the germ of progress is embodied in human nature, and because the joy over an invention made, and the satisfaction felt at a new discovery, in themselves are powerful impulses for the employment of energies in such directions. ”

“ Wherefore if A excogitate a principle to-day, and B, by independent thought, excogitate the same principle to-morrow, both have an equal right to benefit by the discovery; and A has no natural right to debar B from the legitimate fruit of his intellectual effort. It may be even that A had no real priority of thought, but was only more knowing, more greedy, or was simply nearer to a patent office, and, though latest in arriving at the idea, was the first to secure a legal monopoly of its use. ”

“ The inventor benefits by the ideas of the community, and has, therefore, no right to a special privilege for his idea. The universal thought of mankind is a common good; all benefit by it freely, and all are bound freely to contribute to it. Every thinker owes an incalculable debt to society. The inventor has the benefit of all foregone human thought, of all existing civilization. ”

“ That the inventor has a right of use or property in his invention we do not dispute; what we dispute is his exclusive right. To give one inventor such a right is to subvert the principle by denying the right of other inventors, who may be as original, and have worked as hard, and spent as much, but who, owing to a desire to perfect their achievement a little more, or because they live in the provinces,—a day’s journey further off,—come some hours behind, and so are only second or third applicants for the coveted privilege. ”

“ What would they have thought of Christianity and civilization, if he, anticipating the pretensions of modern inventors, had alleged, on the ground of first use, exclusive property in these manufactures, processes, and applications, and had debarred the imitation for fourteen years? The unsophisticated savages would have said, “We understand and allow your claims to possess what you yourself make, but we do not understand, and we dare not allow, your claim to possess what we make ourselves. ”