Thomas Jefferson on Patents

http://cdixon.org/2011/07/16/thomas-jefferson-on-patents/

by apievangelist • 15 years ago

99 36 15 years ago

russell• 15 years ago

Jefferson: "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

dctoedt3• 15 years ago

> it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Jefferson might well have thought so, but it's very far from being self-evident. The Industrial Revolution happened mainly (albeit not exclusively) in England.

buff-a2• 15 years ago

And yet the amount of horse-power generated from steam engines pretty much flatlined in England when Watt's patent was granted, while in other countries it went through the roof. When Watt's patent expired, then the real industrialisation took place.

"During the period of Watt's patents the United Kingdom added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt's patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year."

http://mises.org/daily/3280#note4

hristov• 15 years ago

It should be noted that Thomas Jefferson's opinion on patents changed and he eventually believed that some patents may provide social benefit if only granted for a limited time.

Interestingly, Thomas Jefferson ended up being the first patent examiner of the United States. The first U.S. patent law said that the secretary of state (Jefferson at the time) was to take a lead role in examining patents. Jefferson was a notoriously difficult examiner and granted very few patents.

For more details: http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/pate...

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

And, really, that is probably the way it should be. Patents are out of control and not really providing benefit commensurate with their current cost.

dctoedt3• 15 years ago

The Supreme Court has long relied, implicitly and even explicitly, on Jefferson's views about patents. The Court provided a nice recounting of the evolution of those views in Part II of its landmark opinion in Graham v. John Deere & Co.[1] That part of the Graham opinion is definitely worth reading for anyone who has to deal with the U.S. patent system. The Court observed that:

--snip--

[Jefferson] rejected a natural rights theory in intellectual property rights and clearly recognized the social and economic rationale of the patent system. The patent monopoly was not designed to secure to the inventor his natural right in his discoveries. Rather, it was a reward, an inducement, to bring forth new knowledge.

The grant of an exclusive right to an invention was the creation of society -- at odds with the inherent free nature of disclosed ideas -- and was not to be freely given. Only inventions and discoveries which furthered human knowledge, and were new and useful, justified the special inducement of a limited private monopoly.

Jefferson did not believe in granting patents for small details, obvious improvements, or frivolous devices. His writings evidence his insistence upon a high level of patentability.

--snip--

(Extra paragraphing added.)

The Court noted that Jefferson clearly recognized the difficulty of "drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not."

These Jeffersonian views have been part of the underpinnings of U.S. patent policy for decades.

[1] 383 U.S. 1 (1966), available at http://supreme.justia.com/us/383/1/case.html

petegrif• 15 years ago

excellent summation

flocial2• 15 years ago

That's interesting. Are we still following those precedents but just lost when it comes to software-related patents or are corporations and litigators distorting the system?

edanm• 15 years ago

I think this highlights exactly what is wrong in so many discussions of IP. People get so caught up on the word "right" in "copyright", that they argue for hours on whether there is a right to intellectual property, whether stealing IP is the same as stealing actual physical goods, despite the fact that no one is deprived of something, etc.

The truth is, that's all more-or-less off-topic. The reason we have copyright and a patent system is very simple: they're optimizations to make society better at producing more new stuff. The big question is, do they work? Another valid question is, even if society creates more new stuff under a patent system, is it worth it considering the other problems a patent system has?

angstrom• 15 years ago

It seemed to be a common thread among the founders that the unencumbered sharing of discoveries was a greater good. Patents serve as roadblocks creating a temporary dead end in the process of discovery. It's better to share and have everyone benefit from the fruits of innovation. Of course, most the founders were well off anyhow and patent trolls didn't exist yet, so the topic was a different matter at the time.

http://movingtofreedom.org/2006/08/31/ben-franklin-on-patent...

tobylane2• 15 years ago

So what if a founding father had a clearly set out view of how things should be, it's not like anyone cares what the right people think, they just take their view, and use their own ego to get it somewhere. Some of them even like to ignore what was written down.

They purely being the crappy politicians. I had some better way to word this in my head.

I've read articles of about that length from about 20 people of that century, his is the hardest to read, sort of double-speak.

tobylane2• 15 years ago

To be clear, this was an attacking jest at republicans.

spottiness• 15 years ago

I couldn't help thinking about software when Jefferson refers to ideas. The thinking power called software...

georgieporgie• 15 years ago

Jefferson was also strongly opposed to creating international debt. Great, you say, we wouldn't have our current fiscal crisis. Except that some debt was a necessary step for the United States to become the financial powerhouse it is, based upon international trade. If Jefferson had gotten his way on debt, we'd be a small nation of rather poor farmers, at least until a richer nation invaded.

So, be cautious in quoting the wisdom of the founding fathers. They were by no means infallible, though selective quoting of their vast writing might lead one to believe that they were.

sp3322• 15 years ago

We were a small nation of rather poor farmers, right up until a handful of Canadians (British at the time) beat the snot out of our military and burned our capital in the War of 1812. If the marines hadn't been funded during the First Barbary War in 1800-1805, we probably would have lost the War of 1812. It really put the lie to Jefferson's agrarian utopia.

jamieb3• 15 years ago

Are you saying that the first barbary war was funded by debt, or that Jefferson was a pacifist, or what exactly?

flocial2• 15 years ago

Another illustration of how far we've strayed from founding principles. Sometimes our system feels like a large software project gone wrong. People keep adding line after line without refactoring or bolting on libraries that conflict with initial design or add a head-spinning array of conditionals that make it unrecognizeable.

We have more tools to search for a better way that is equitable to all. If only we had a majority of politicians that could engage in more intellectual discourse and not legislate between campaigning and serving constituents and corporate interests before the people.

killerswan• 15 years ago

Legal code and computer code can have more in common than either politicians or programmers usually want to admit... It is some sort of miracle that the USA has lasted this long at all!

rflrob• 15 years ago

This quote seems to fall victim to the Naturalistic fallacy. That which is natural is not necessarily good, and that which is good is not necessarily natural. Whether or not patents have an overall positive effect is reasonable to debate, just don't say that they're unnatural, and therefore wrong.

hxa7241• 15 years ago

The point is not quite that.

The point is not: they are not natural therefore they are wrong. It is: they are not natural, therefore they are not simply, automatically right -- they can have only a practical justification.

va_coder• 15 years ago

I thought I was reading something written by Richard Stallman.

Produce3• 15 years ago

The fact that we managed to get to the point where patents were legislated, while developing all of the necessary technology in the process, without patents proves that patents are not required for progress to occur.

mmorris• 15 years ago

While it is certainly true that patents are not required for progress to occur, I don't believe anyone is arguing that.

The question is whether more progress occurs under the current patent system than would without it (or under an altered system). Are inventors more likely to be properly rewarded for their inventions, thereby motivating them to invent? And does the value of this motivated invention outweigh the value of allowing everyone the ability to freely build on others' inventions?

It is certainly a tricky question to answer, but you can look at the problems faced by countries that don't have strong patent enforcement to get an idea of what would happen if we scrapped the system entirely.

It does seem to me that the situation has gotten out of hand, with completely obvious inventions (especially in the software field) being granted patents, but that doesn't mean that doing away with the entire system is the answer - which your argument here seems to imply.

Produce3• 15 years ago

The more important question we should be asking is if we really think that sacrificing freedom in the name of efficiency is a good idea. Freedom is equated with happiness, efficiency is equated with a lot of stuff. Have our mountains of stuff managed to solve world hunger? End wars? Do they make us happier? I think that it makes sense to increase efficiency up to a certain point, after which it has negative effects. That point is bringing people out of poverty, since studies have found that those are the only conditions under which money/stuff increase happiness.

Thomas Jefferson on Patents

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