“Three-fourths of the Patents, Inventions of Englishmen.—Three-fourths of the applications for Patents, or thereabouts, are for the inventions of Englishmen; the remaining one-fourth are for the inventions of foreigners, for the most part Frenchmen and Americans. The country in which inventions are of the highest value will draw inventions to it from all others, and so long as any one country protects inventions by Patent, so long must all countries protect. Were England to abolish protection of inventions, inventors would carry their inventions to other countries. Switzerland does not protect, and consequently the Swiss take their inventions to other countries.”
Why? What harm though the British inventor should go abroad to patent or even to work his invention? He must specify it in the country he goes to; and cannot, will not, our artisans at once avail themselves, and revel in the free use, of what he there records? Call our nation’s not rewarding him a piece of doubtful policy, or want of generosity; but banish the notion that our trade will suffer. It will gain.
But there are defenders of very different calibre: Mr. MacCulloch,[3] Sir David Brewster, Mr. John Stuart Mill. It is meet I should inform the House what are their arguments. I find them succinctly stated and well put in Mr. Mill’s “Political Economy.” I will read the whole of that gentleman’s observations, interlacing, for brevity’s sake, very short and unargumentative dissents, if not replies:—
“The condemnation of monopolies ought not to extend to Patents, by which the originator—”
Does Mr. Mill know that many an invention is patented by some person who is not the originator, but only the first promulgator in Britain; still more often, who is not the only originator?
“of an improved process—”
I have already shown that the law, rightly read, can hardly be said to sanction the patenting of a “process.”
“is allowed to enjoy, for a limited period, the exclusive privilege of using his own improvement.”
Which means, the privilege of debarring all other people—some of whom may, after him, or at the same time as he, or even before him, have invented it—from doing what he is, and they also should be, allowed to do.
“This is not making the commodity dear for his benefit, but merely postponing—”