This I can from experience endorse. He is then asked—
“If you were able to prove that you had been carrying on an invention, whatever it might be, at the time when the person claiming to hold a Patent for it took out his Patent, would not that relieve you from all difficulty in the matter?—It would only give me the pleasure of defending a law-suit.”
Mr. Curtis, engineer, Manchester, said:—
“Many parties in trade have made alterations without being aware of their being patented, and when they have used them for a length of time, they have found that the patentee has come upon them and made a claim for Patent-right.”
Mr. Platt, of Oldham, whom you are happy to see as a member, said:—
“I think that there is scarcely a week, certainly not a month, that passes but what we have a notice of some kind or other of things that we have never heard of in any way, and do not know of in the least, that we are infringing upon them, and the difficulty is to get at any knowledge. We may be now infringing, and may have been infringing for years, and a person may have been watching us all the time, and when he thinks that we have made a sufficient number he may come down upon us, and there is no record. A very large number of Patents are now taken out for what is termed a combination of known things, and known things for the same purpose, and the descriptions of those Patents are generally so bad that it is impossible to tell the parts that are actually patented; in matters of that kind it has become a very serious question as to conducting a large business.”
In 1851, Sir William Cubitt spoke of an inventor of filters:—
“After he began to supply his customers, he received notice from a house in Liverpool that he would be prosecuted; he received intimation of legal proceedings against him for interfering with his, the Liverpool man’s, Patent. I have some of those filters. The manufacturer of these things, who had no Patent, came to me to consult me upon the subject. I at once saw how the case stood, having regard to the specification of the Liverpool patentee, that he (the latter) had taken out a Patent for that which another man had before done, so exactly that the words of the specification and the drawings fitted the first man’s invention, which was without a Patent, therefore his Patent would have been null and void. I advised my friend to write to the patentee to inform him of the fact that he had taken up a case which he could not support, and that he himself was infringing upon the invention of the first man, who had no Patent; that brought the Liverpool man to me, I having been referred to as having one of these filters in use. I explained to him that I had had the patent filter of the other man for two or three years. Then what was to be done? I advised my friend, who was in fact one of the Ransomes, of Ipswich, to tell the Liverpool patentee if he did not come to some arrangement of a business-like nature, he himself would have to become the prosecutor, and to sue out the ‘scire facias’ to make him prove his Patent-right, which is an expensive legal proceeding, and very troublesome to a patentee. I believe they have since made some business arrangement; but that shows how Patents may be, and are frequently, taken out for things which have been previously invented.”
As to the bad effects of Patents, I quote again from Mr. Scott Russell:—