The realisation of these fears, as well as the inconsistency of our practice with the conditions which our forefathers, more wise than the present generation, imposed, will be seen from the specimen extracts which I will now read, begging that it be remembered a very large reduction in the cost of Patents was made in 1852. The House will pardon me if it finds these extracts are not arranged with any rigid regard to order, but form a too rudis indigestaque moles.
The following prove that there is a natural tendency to excessive multiplication of Patents, and to the making of the same inventions, and of inventions directed to the same end, or moving on the same line, by a number of persons at or about one and the same time.
This very week you read in the papers a judgment given by the Lord Chancellor, which contains the declaration that a person in specifying an invention may be held as preventing “the loss for a year or more to the public of the fruits of the ingenuity of many minds which commonly are working together in regard to the same invention.”
The Journal of Jurisprudence says well:—
“The rights of the inventor are also liable to interference of another kind. A rival manufacturer invents independently the same machine, or one involving the same principle. He is then, by natural law, at liberty to publish his invention without regard to the rights of the first inventor, seeing that he did not acquire his knowledge of its powers from the latter, and experience proves that, in point of fact, the same processes are frequently discovered by different individuals independently of each other. In an age of mechanical invention, an inventor cannot deprive the world of a new process by keeping it a secret. He can at most only retard the progress of discovery by a few years.... We submit that the fundamental principle of any legislative contract between inventors and the public should be, that the right of using the invention should be open to all Her Majesty’s subjects. Exclusive privileges, conferred for the purpose of enabling patentees to divide their profits with a few favoured manufacturing establishments, are indefensible upon any recognised principles of economy. Patents are in fact, as they are in law considered to be, trading monopolies; and the interests of the public imperatively require that, as monopolies, they should be swept away.”
Mr. Webster, Q.C., a high authority, says:—
“I mean the discovery, for instance, of some chemical property, or the application of some property, of matter of recent discovery, or a certain effect, for instance, in dyeing; that becoming known as a chemical law, then persons rush to obtain Patents for different applications and different modifications of it.”
See by my next quotations how great is the obstruction the multiplication of Patents creates, or, in the words of the Act, the “general inconvenience” they occasion.
Mr. James Meadows Rendel, Civil Engineer, in 1851:—