Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [155]
The 1852 law really represents the beginning of a patents system in Britain. It swept aside an antiquated machinery. England, Scotland, and Ireland were consolidated into one area. The application fee was reduced to £18o. A single Patent Office was created, with a staff of commissioners and clerks-most notably the tireless Bennet Woodcroft, who devoted himself to establishing a functional system. Above all, perhaps, Woodcroft instituted a reliable and accessible archive of patents, with indexes, lodged in one location. From now on an applicant would receive provisional protection from the moment of application, thus closing the window of opportunity that pirates like those of Brewster's kaleidoscope had previously enjoyed. But not every measure favored by Brewster and his allies found favor. Some witnesses, for example, had opposed the lowering of application fees, for fear of unleashing a flood of trivial patents by overambitious factoryworkmen. And most had opposed the notion of a panel of "men of science" to vet applications, preferring to leave patentees to defend their own claims. The result was that fees, while reduced, remained substantial, and it remained the responsibility of patentees to defend their patents. Although an application would be examined by the commissioners before any patent was granted, the examination remained rather pro forma. There was to be no tribunal, and the process remained free of "scientific" input except in the form of ad hoc advisors (who in practice were rarely consulted). Nor was there to be a special court for judging patent disputes.22
As remarkable as the creation of areal patent system, however, was the simultaneous advent of real and sustained calls for patents to be abolished altogether. Among the first of those prepared to voice this possibilitywas the MP John Lewis Ricardo, nephew of David Ricardo, the great political economist, and himself a convinced opponent of the Corn Laws. The younger Ricardo was the chairman of one of the early telegraph companies - telegraphy being by far the most advanced and exciting commercial science of the day. He had found himself forced to buy up patents to forestall litigation, and was therefore inclined by his own experience to see them as monopolistic obstacles to laissez-faire. He pointed out-as manywould repeat in the next generation-that patents had not been required to stimulate the invention of printing, gunpowder, or paper. Only "trivial" improvements tended to be patented, he claimed. In the end, Ricardo denied outright that patents accelerated invention. He maintained instead that they were an unnecessary impediment-the equivalent, in effect, to the navigation acts or the Corn Laws themselves.23
Ricardo'swas at first a lonely view But soon it attracted more support. In fact, it was the process of vetting the new law in 18¢-52 that sparked the emergence of a movement dedicated to the cause of abolition. This movement would last a generation and of find backing from all sectors of society. In part, this was because, by abolishing the administrative problems of the old regime, the inauguration of a rationalized system brought deeper, intrinsic problems into sharper relief. Those problems had to do with the nature of invention itself, the social identity of the inventor, the relations between science, the public, and progress, and the political economy of laissez-faire. More immediately, however, what triggered the ensuing controversies was the fact that the practice of patenting now took effect in a realm of commerce and manufacturing that increasingly saw itself as international in scope, and taking effect in an empire of free trade. That is, it introduced aproblem of space, at precisely the same time as it focused attention on attributes of patents that were deemed to be essential. The combination proved incendiary.
In the mid-nineteenth century agrowing impetus