THE MENACED PATENTEES.
WE do not envy the position of Sir Bounden Palmer. At the annual meeting of the Law Amendment So- ciety, he threatened to amend the law of patents, and showed some disposition to abolish it altogether. He had better, so far as his own comfort is concerned, have uttered a diatribe against barristers, or declared schoolmasters generally in- efficient, or menaced the publicans' monopoly, or discovered a new poet, or pronounced for Du Chaffin, or criticized Mr. Reade, or doubted the inspiration of the Record, or done any other thing of the many which are certain to bring wasps' nest about the ears of anybody unlucky enough to have an opinion of his own. The whole tribe of patentees are rising in the air like angry bees, and in a few days he will have the pleasant alternatives of flight, battle, or death from the crowds of his insignificant little assailants. Every- body with a patent will scream at him about vested rights. Everybody with an invention—and who has not one ?—will denounce him as an intellectual Proudhon, a man who wants to legalize the theft of ideas, and whose studies ought to be directed at once to the Decalogue, under the superinten- dence of at least five curates. All over the country, in great cities and little villages, are men of every rank—soldiers, clergymen, engineers, doctors, and mechanics, who have each of them some pet notion, some fancied or real discovery, worked out with clumsy models, which only waits a little spare cash to secure first a patent, and then—Aladdin's lamp. Every such inventor sees a fortune in his discovery. If it involves a new principle he talks of Wheatstone, and thinks of Arkwright ; while, if it is only a trifle, a corkscrew or a new elastic, a rushlight or a new brace, he comforts himself with the thought that the million want his discovery, and that millions of pennies still make fortunes. Upon all these men and their relatives, and the circles their one idea has strongly impressed, a relaxation of the Patent law will fall like a calamity, and Sir R. Palmer will soon find that he is striking at interests and classes, instead of simply improv- ing a scientific law. Before the hubbub commences, it may be well to examine how far the popular faith in the utility of patents, and the doubt which seems from time to time to harass the thinking class, are in accordance with facts. We may dismiss, we presume extreme views on either side without much discus- sion. Nobody seriously proposes to abolish the right of inventors like Arkwright, or Cort, or Bessemer, or Wheat- stone, men who have revolutionized society by thought on mechanics, of the readiest and simplest method of Obtaining vast profits. Nor does any one, except some crotchety genius, seriously demand that the rights of a patentee shall be engrafted into the common law ; that the rights of a man in an idea shall be made perpetual, and arise without formulas from the mere fact that it is his. Such ideas, though sometimes discussed, like all other first principles, with advantage, are remote from practical politics. Most men think out inventions in order to make money, and some method of guarding their right to the consequent profits is practically indispensable. At the same time the absolute and permanent monopoly of an idea, such as a man certainly has in a house, would be injurious to the common weal. England would have been a different land if Arkwright's jenny were still only used by the permission and for the profit of Arkwright's representatives. It is between these two extremes that the right path must be discovered, and it is for the opponents of the Patent law to prove that the path already opened leads only to mischief. They argue that patents are granted irregularly, for light and trivial reasons, and for methods which are but " sugges- tions of the necessary consequences of the knowledge which mankind already possessed in common." That is the defini- tion used by Sir Eoundell Palmer, and it seems sufficiently broad. Strictly interpreted, it includes every conceivable invention, for no man ever discovered anything except a combination of forces or materials which mankind already knew to exist. Even in the sense in which the speaker doubtless employed it, it would exclude all but the most absolutely novel ideas—would grant, for example, a patent to Mr. Wheatstone, and refuse one to Mr. Morse, and the host of inventors who are increasing the utility of the original telegraph. Surely the man who by patient experiment, or by the intuitive power of genius, or by sheer mother-wit, extends, or cheapens, or simplifies an existing process, is entitled to some reward for his ingenuity. Or is he, failing that reward, to keep it a secret, as working men unable to pay for a patent almost invariably try to do ? And if a patent is refused, how is he to obtain the reward ? The Times puts the very strong case of a railway company, which finds that its own engineers have patented all the new turn-tables, sidings, rails, and railway improvements gene- rally, and sees itself bound to repay these monopolists. That seems hard, but the hardship is only in seeming, for the railway, without these gentlemen's efforts, would not have the improvements at all. They keep the company out of nothing, and the public out of nothing, except as every other workman does. Why should a man invent turn-tables for nothing any more than roll trucks or drive engines with- out the wages which he sees fit to demand ? The price asked may be extortionate, and a regulation on that point, if it is possible, might, as the patentee has a monopoly, be amply justified. But the right to some pay is clear, and the inventor can no more get pay except by an exclusive right to his idea, than a house-owner can get rent except through an exclusive right to his house.
But, it is argued, not only does the inventor ask too much, but he asks money for ideas which are not ideas at all, merely the knowledge gained naturally from the practical working of old designs. That is often the case, but it is a reason for refusing the patent, or limiting the time of the grant, not for destroying the principle of patent laws. Take an illustration, which we use because it will be so familiar. Everybody knows Lund's corkscrew, the clever little in- strument which has of late years superseded the trouble- some endless screw. There is nothing new in it in prin- ciple. Corks, and levers, and scissors, existed a good many years before the inventor was born. Still even those who pay for the screw will acknowledge that a fair right to reward for that bit of household ingenuity does really exist. Well, the next man who contrives to put a brush on that little machine will certainly double its use, but he is not exactly entitled to a patent. Sir R. Palmer's idea seems to be that because he is not, therefore the corkscrew maker is not, a theory we hold to be destructive of all reward for invention, and therefore of all those inventions not made out of pure philanthropy and love of progress. The remedy for the practice of giving the brushman a patent is simply a more honest and fearless application of the existing law. We want a few more rejections, not the abandonment of a prin- ciple which has helped to make the age one of incessant discovery. The law gives power enough to the patent com- missioners, and if they are careless, the appointment of one of them as Devil's Advocate, or ex-eicio pleader against the patents, would be an ample security. At present the tendency is to admit patents a little too readily for the sake of income.
We have mentioned the charge of extortion, and in this there may be reality. Inventors have sometimes a lunatic idea of their own importance, and a hard obstinacy, arising from excited imaginations, which neither reason nor fact; can overcome. An engineer with a new turn-table is quite capable of asking a royalty equal to twice the profit the saving of labour involves. But that might surely be met by an act which would leave the principle of the existing laws untouched. In the first place, dead patents should be wholly forbidden. Any man whose invention remained un- used for a term, say, of five years, should lose it ex facto. If the absence of use proceeds from the neglect of the public, he will lose nothing ; if from his own extortion, he will be reduced to terms by the fear of profit escaping him altogether. This would, moreover, diminish the evil of patents taken out to include every modification of a single idea, the great ma- jority of which the patentee has no intention whatever to use. The right thus limited might be farther restrained by considering that the purchase of right to use a potent is matter of public concern, and by bringing it under the rules which regulate other such transactions. If a mr,i2 owns a field essential to a new road, and puts on it a preposterous demanding the close of the Russian war, and assailing Price, he is compelled to submit to award. Why should not Turkey. It has since taken the Conservative side with the the patentee submit too, and so accept, like everybody else, enthusiasm of a true partisan in every question of home and not the reward he thinks due to himself, but the reward foreign politics except the one to which we have alluded.
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