[Richard Neill]
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me….Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”
- Thomas Jefferson
There is no natural right to the exclusive ownership of an idea, still
less to prevent other people from independently conceiving and utilising
the same idea. Even if there were, everyone “stands upon the shoulders
of giants”, and their own contribution is a tiny fraction of what they
have learned from others.
So, why does the state grant monopolies to inventors? The principle of
a patent is to encourage inventors to publish their invention: rather
than remaining a secret, the idea will eventually enter the public
domain. In return, the state grants a time-limited monopoly to the
inventor. Society benefits from inventions, and clearly, rewarding
inventors for their creativity is a good thing. However, the patent
system is so broken, both in principle and in practice, that it harms
inventors and consumers alike.
The patent system acts as a brake on innovation. For example, the
development of the aeroplane was slowed by the patent on the aileron
(leading to the deaths of many test-pilots flying less-stable craft); the RProxy system, which could enable a worldwide 6-fold increase in Internet speed for zero cost, has never been released for fear of lawsuits; and much research is not published until it can first be patented. This damages the scientific co-operation that gave us the modern world. Many patents are explicitly evil: Monsanto sues farmers whose crops become
cross-pollinated with their Roundup-resistant seeds, and people die in the Third World because of the high-cost of licensing AIDS drugs.
Patents are too-widely granted, even for “obvious” inventions (or where
prior-art exists), and so almost every invention somehow infringes upon
someone else’s patent. An inventor is far more likely to be sued for
infringing upon another patent, than he is to benefit from the
protection of his own idea. Small companies are especially
vulnerable to “Patent Trolls” – those who prey upon successful companies
by launching patent-litigation against their existing products. Patent
Trolls (such as Eolas and Forgent) are never just, and only
occasionally legally correct, but it is usually too costly to fight
them. Large companies can afford the lawyers and cross-license, but pass
on increased costs and less innovative products to consumers.
Yet for all this harm, patents are useless to their owners. Even IBM
regards its vast patent portfolio as primarily useful for a “mutually
assured destruction” defense. Instead, the way to profit from your
creativity is to be the first to market with a good product. For example,
the iPod is not “innovative” – it was not the first portable MP3 player –
yet Apple has achieved huge market share.
At this point, the argument is often made that the patent system is
justified by the huge cost of pharmaceuticals research: how could drug
companies justify such enormous and risky investment, without a promised monopoly at the end? This is indeed a special case, but the solution is to change the funding model, not to award patents. If pharmaceutical patents didn’t exist, then we would need to directly fund development and trials (much of the basic research is already performed by medical charities and universities), but at the same time, co-operation between researchers would increase, drugs would be selected on purely clinical criteria, and the cost of drugs would plummet. The overall cost to the NHS would actually decrease.
Therefore, I propose that the UK should become a Patent-Haven. We should unilaterally abolish the patent system: no patents would be valid in the UK and, in return, our own patents would be voided internationally. This would cause innovation to flourish, and encourage manufacturing to return. This has happened before: the reason the Chemical Industry is principally located in Switzerland is that, at the time, they had no
patent restrictions.
