Thomas Jefferson on Patents

Vote him down but it is true. See: http://blog.mises.org/10217/yet-another-study-finds-patents-...

yet somehow people keep repeating this.. He is also right that copyright came out of the desire to censor people. Patents are a relic from the time when state monopoly power was granted to many more things than just inventions.

  * Would Watt and his investor have built steam engines without the patent?
  * Did the patent enable Watt to create a market which otherwise did not exists?

To argue that patents were overall beneficial, one has to argue that without the patent, steam engines would not have become popular, and for that two things would have had to be true: 1. Watt would not build engines and 2. Nobody else would build them either. There is an argument that nobody else would have built them because there was no market, and only Watt's patent allowed them to create the market. Except that to believe that, one has to ignore the fact that a) England was undergoing the industrial revolution in all aspects (not just steam engines) and b) there was a huge need for industrial power removed from water wheels. Watt did not invent the steam engine. He invented an improvement, simultaneously along with many others. But only he had the clout to get the government to enforce his patent.

So its not hard to say "whether overall the English patent system facilitated that process": it most certainly did not facilitate that process, and the "temporary roadblocks" you describe were demonstrably the only effect, and a negative one.

To argue "the english had the most dramatic industrial revolution and the english had a patent system, therefore the patent system caused the industrial revolution" is to ignore the political, economic and scientific history of the country.

Edit: this bit is my opinion: England's supremacy is entirely due to its separation from the catholic church: it generated a need for military supremacy and at the same time freed the minds of thinkers to be scientific. Do you think Cambridge scholars had to worry about being locked up by the inquisition like Galileo?

Yes that is a fair point and I should be flogged for referencing numbers so poorly supported. However, that does not make them wrong. A thorough review of all the evidence shows that: a) Watt stopped adding inventions after 1782, and b) when his patent expired in 1804 horsepower of new engines rose immediately and significantly. After securing his patents he left the engine unchanged for some 22 years.

It should also be said that Watt's patent was an exception: his connections to power allowed his patent to be extended for 24 years by parliament. However the "regular" patent system impeded Watt. He had to use the inefficient sun and planet gear instead of a crank because Pickard had patented it. Pickard patented the crank: a device we have evidence of from 5BC. Watt used his less efficient gear system until the patent expired, and then immediately switched. Pickard had offered to license the crank in exchange for the condenser, but Watt spent a year inventing his gears instead.

Fact: a number of significant improvements were made to steam engines by people other than Watt.

Fact: the patent system prevented anyone but Watt from selling steam engines because he had a patent for the condenser, without which all other inventions were pointless.

Fact: Watt did not license any of these improvements, nor allow anyone to license his patent, nor make any further improvements of his own.

Fact: only when Watt's patent expired were these technologies incorporated into products (and immediately so).

Fact: Steam engine technology was stopped for 22 years by the patent system.

The numbers are not in question. The question is, "without patents, would any of the inventions have happened at all?" Watt basically bankrupted himself developing the condenser to the extent that he took a job for a couple of years. It then got investment in exchange for a share of the patent. Would anyone have invested in his idea without patent protection? I do not have any proof one way or the other, only evidence that thousands of businesses are started every year without support of a patent.

The issue is of great concern to HN readers: we make a living through our intellectual property. Watt made a ton of money because he could patent his idea. Without patent protection, he would have had to compete in manufacturing, service, or rapid innovation. With patent protection, he could have one good idea and hit the jackpot. Although I may personally like the idea of making a million off an idea, I believe that the world is better served by allowing ideas to be unpatentable, and instead requiring competition in execution.

Jefferson wasn't against industrialisation, nor was he against a strong army. He just didn't want it to be a "standing army". He imagined that you might end up with an organization that is run by an elite, using canon fodder made up of the poor, that serves its own purposes. Would any of the founding fathers be surprised that we have a standing army and two totally pointless wars?

Instead, he wanted every citizen to be required to do military service, as the swiss and israelis do. He believed that if every US citizen had military training, we would have wiped the floor with the canadians in 1812. I agree.