“The unlimited power given by a monopoly to an inventor has this practical effect at present, that when an invention has been made the subject of a Patent, everybody shrinks from it, everybody runs away from it, everybody avoids it as an unlimited evil, because the person who has the monopoly can subject you to a most expensive prosecution, and can charge you a most inconvenient sum for what you have done, and can punish you in every way for having touched his invention.”
Mr. Grove says it is natural that people should yield to the holder of the Patent, for, if
“He has a letter from a patentee saying, ‘You are infringing my Patent;’ I do not believe that the tradesman would go to the expense of litigation with the patentee, and for this reason, it is the patentee’s interest to give a very large sum of money to support his Patent. His Patent, although for a very trivial thing, may, taking the vast extent of sale, be a very lucrative affair, and therefore it is worth his while to lay out a large sum of money to support his Patent. It is not worth the while of the opponent, because he has only a little stock which affects him; the patentee has his whole interest consolidated in the Patent. All those who might oppose the Patent are a scattered body, namely, the public generally, not one of whom has any strong interest in opposing the Patent; and I believe that that has been very much worked by patentees, particularly in a small and comparatively frivolous and perhaps an all but useless invention. The public is a scattered body, not one of whom has sufficient interest to meet with equal force the patentee.”
Mr. Platt, M.P., presents the following case, to show how unprincipled people use the power which the law gives them, and how, even with a good case, if they but knew it to be so, people in business are led to succumb to extortion:—
“The fourteen years of the Patent had expired, and five years, so that it was nineteen years from the date of the Patent before the action that I now speak of was commenced. It was commenced by the parties, and I may say that the person who was the original patentee was a person of no money whatever; but he persuaded some party, I believe some lawyer, to advance some money in order to take up this case. I know that many machine-makers, rather than contest the case, absolutely paid the money—the different sums of money that were demanded of them. I came up this afternoon with a gentleman in a train from Manchester, who mentioned this case to me, and who stated that one of his own clients offered as large a sum as £2,000 in one case, to settle the matter. I found that the system was to attack the smaller men, and by that means to extract money in different ways, and there have been a number of instances in which parties have paid in that way. Although not attacked in this instance myself, a neighbour of mine was; I looked over his evidence, and I told him that I thought I could amend it very much, and I told him further that I would be a party to the expense. I said, let me take the case in hand, which I did. Now, nineteen years is a very long time for a machine, and this machine was of a very valuable kind; hundreds upon thousands had been made during the nineteen years, and if this person could have established his claim to a Patent-right, he would have made a very large sum of money, so large as to be almost incalculable. It so happened that I recollected, when it was brought to my memory, that we had made a number of those machines long before the date of that Patent, and the difficulty then was to prove that such a machine had been made, for in nineteen years, speaking of cotton machinery, such machines would probably all have been broken up, scarcely any were to be found in the country; but it so happened that in one instance a very large firm of manufacturers in Preston, of the name of Horrocks, Miller, and Co., had two or three of these machines still left. I got Mr. Miller to come up to London, and we brought one of these machines with us. It was taken into court, and in a moment their own witness admitted that this was precisely the same thing that the other parties had been paying royalty to this man for, and the case was at once abandoned by Mr. Webster, who was then conducting it.”
Sir W. Armstrong told the Commission:—
“Another great evil of the Patent system is this, that an invalid Patent really answers the purpose of protection almost as well as a valid one. I believe that there is not one Patent in ten which would bear scrutiny, and the mere name of a Patent often answers all the purpose. Nobody will face the litigation necessary to get rid of it.
“In very many cases people prefer to pay black mail rather than undergo the expense of a law-suit?—In almost all cases; I know that in my own experience, if I find that a man has a Patent which I am satisfied is not a valid one, I would rather go out of the way to avoid any conflict with him.”
So also Mr. Curtis:—