Perhaps I should object to the following representation:—
It has been proposed to replace Letters Patent by grants from the national purse. This is to revert to an obsolete custom. During the eighteenth century it was fairly tried, and the result should serve as a warning now. Seventy thousand pounds were distributed among plausible inventors in the course of fifty years. The advantage to the public was nil. The encouragement given to impostors was the only tangible result. Johanna Stephens obtained 5,000l. for disclosing the secret of her cure for the stone. A Mr. Blake got 2,500l. to assist him in perfecting his scheme for transporting fish to London by land, while a Mr. Foden was greatly overpaid with 500l., “to enable him to prosecute a discovery made by him of a paste as a substitute for wheat-flour.” Give a man a sum of money for his invention, and you run the risk of paying him either too much or too little. Give him a Patent, and you secure the invention for the public, while his remuneration in money is absolutely determined according to its value.
The system of State-rewards has not been tried. The reviewer’s cases do not apply. The scheme that I submit could never be abused so as to sanction such follies. It may not be a generous and royal way of dealing with inventions, but it is equitable and safe; whereas, pace the reviewer, the remuneration from a Patent is not at all “determined according to its value” (that of the invention).
This interesting article is remarkable for what it omits rather than what it contains. Like almost every, if not every, defence of Patents which I have seen, it ignores the grand objection to Patents—their incompatibility with free-trade. From the beginning to the end there is not in the article the slightest allusion to the hardship they inflict on British manufacturers in competing with rivals in home, and especially in foreign, markets. Reformers of the Patent system fail to realise this—that no conceivable mere improvement, even, though it should clear away the present encumbrance of a multiplicity of trifling Patents, can be more than an alleviation of the mischief now done. The remaining few would be the most important and valuable ones, and therefore the most burdensome, because those which, on account of the heavy royalties that will be legally claimed, must subject British manufacturers to the largest pecuniary exactions—exactions that they cannot, but their rivals often would, escape.
The writer of the article has a way of pooh-poohing adverse arguments, even when he mentions them.
That no two men produce the same book is true. It is almost as difficult for two men to give to the world two inventions identical in every detail, and equally well-fitted to subserve the same end. Much has been said about the ease with which this may be done, but authentic proofs are lacking of this having been done on a large scale.
And
Again, then, we ask for proofs of the allegation that six men are often on the track of the self-same invention.
Why, the simultaneousness, or rapid succession, of identical inventions is notorious.