Abstract
MUCH of the leading article in NATURE of Nov. 9 involves the assumption that the purpose of patents is to encourage inventions, or even inventors. There may have been a time when that was true, though it must be remembered that the grant of a monopoly was originally a bribe for the disclosure of an invention, not a reward for making it; but it belongs to the remote past. It was a time when the same person could be inventor, workman, foreman, manager, and director, when organised research was unknown, and industry progressed unforeseeably by discontinuous mutations. In the completely different economic and intellectual atmosphere of the modern world, the patent machine has ceased to work according to the intentions of its designers and cannot fulfil the purpose for which they designed it. With our admirable English adaptability, the envy of all foreign observers, we have converted it to other purposes, not less vital to the community. Patents now serve to provide financiers with convenient weapons for their mutual warfare, and patent agents with a living.1 The British Science Guild wisely recognised the change when it constituted its Patents Committee mainly of those who regard an invention merely as the occasion for the issue of a legal document. Industrial scientists would be wise to recognise it too.
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CAMPBELL, N. [Letters to Editor]. Nature 124, 875 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124875a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124875a0
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