The subjoined letters, with which I am favoured, will be read with interest and advantage:—
FROM SIR WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, C.B.
As to the cost of the system to the public, I don’t see how it could be calculated, for it consists not merely of the licence fees, but also of the loss resulting from the stamping out of competition, which would cheapen production and, in most cases, lead to improvement. My great objection to our indiscriminate Patent system is, that it is scarcely possible to strike out in any new direction without coming in contact with Patents for schemes so crudely developed as to receive little or no acceptance from the public, but which, nevertheless, block the road to really practical improvement.
Nothing, I think, can be more monstrous than that so grave a matter as a monopoly should be granted to any person for anything without inquiry either as to private merit or public policy—in fact, merely for the asking and the paying. Amongst other evils of this indiscriminate system is that the majority of Patents granted are bad, and yet such is the dread of litigation, that people submit to a Patent they know to be bad rather than involve themselves in the trouble and expense of resisting it. So that a bad Patent, in general, answers just as well as a good one.
One of the most common arguments in favour of Patents is, that they are necessary to protect the poor inventor, but it is manufacturers and capitalists, and not working men, who make great profits by Patents, and that, too, in a degree which has no reference either to the merit of the inventor or the importance of the invention. One rarely hears of a working man making a good thing of a Patent. If he hits upon a good idea he has seldom the means of developing it to a marketable form, and he generally sells it for a trifle to a capitalist, who brings it to maturity and profits by it. He could sell his idea just as well without any Patent-Law.
May 13, 1869.
FROM ANOTHER HIGH PRACTICAL AUTHORITY, LIKEWISE A NOTABLE INVENTOR.
I would not for one moment deny that instances could be named in which the absence of a Patent-Law might have proved a hardship to a real inventor, but I feel quite satisfied in my own mind that whatever may hitherto have been the case, the time has now fully arrived when infinitely less injustice would, upon the whole, be occasioned by the absence of all Patent-Laws than by the best Patent-Law that could be devised. All Patents for inventions must be considered as founded upon expediency and not upon the idea of any inherent right which the inventor possesses beyond the right of using his invention, or keeping the secret of it to himself. A community may consider it to their advantage to protect inventions by means of Patent-Laws, but a man can have no abstract or natural right to the exclusive benefits of his invention, for such an idea would imply that nobody else could have produced it. The question is, therefore, entirely one of expediency, but not one of right. Again, a very common argument used in support of a Patent-Law is that an inventor is as much entitled to an exclusive right to his invention as an author is to the produce of his pen, but there is really very little resemblance between the two cases, and I believe it would be very inexpedient to utterly abolish Copyright. “Paradise Lost” would never have been written but for Milton; but with the utmost respect for Bell, Fulton, and Stephenson, who would pretend to believe that without them we should still have to be dependent upon the wind for our movements at sea, and the common road ashore? A man who writes a book does not interfere with me in the slightest degree, but the inventor, or more probably the so-called inventor, backed by the Patent-Law, may most unjustly involve me in much trouble and expense. I should be very glad to see a good round sum set apart by Government for the purpose of being awarded to real inventors by competent and impartial authority. Then the poor inventor might have some chance. You will certainly, in my opinion, have done a good turn to this country if you can only get every vestige of Patent-Law swept from the statute-book, and with my best wishes for the success of your motion, I am, &c.