A question of utility
Patents are protected by governments because they are held
to promote innovation.
But there is plenty of evidence that they do not
THE Great Exhibition, staged in London in 1851, was intended to show
off the inventive genius of Victorian Britain. In doing so it
sparked a hardfought debate on intellectual property. On one side
were public figures horrified at the thought of inviting the whole
world to see the nation’s best ideas, only to have most of it go
straight home and copy them. They called for the patent system to be
made cheaper and easier to navigate, and for the rights it conferred
to be more forcefully upheld. These demands, though, were met with a
backlash. Supported by economic liberals who had successfully fought
for the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws a few years earlier,
this side of the debate argued that free trade and competition were
good for the economy; that patents were a restraint on both; and
that therefore patents should be not reformed, but done away with.
The Economist, founded by opponents of the Corn Laws, was an
enthusiastic promoter of this abolitionist movement. A leader in our
July 26th issue that year thundered that the granting of patents
“excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable
them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels
betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits [and] bestows rewards
on the wrong persons.” In perhaps our first reference to what are
now called “patent trolls”, we fretted that “Comprehensive patents
are taken out by some parties, for the purpose of stopping
inventions, or appropriating the fruits of the inventions of
others.”
Read more at http://www.economist.com/node/21660559