Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [160]
Why this dramatic upsurge of support? The antipatent case rested on a number of claims about invention and the inventor, and about their place in industrial society, that many in Victorian Britain could recognize. Most fundamentally, it involved a commitment to an understanding of invention (and of progress more broadly) as being gradualist, collective, and methodical in nature. The antipatent camp insisted that invention was a process of reasoning, or of rule following. Almost anyone could, in principle, be an inventor, by following methods that in a modern industrial societylike Britain were widely understood. Inventors were not heroes at all, but everymen. Had Watt not built his steam engine, someone else would surely have made its equivalent before long. And the inventor, like the scientific discoverer, drew on a universal reservoir of knowledge - one that was available to all, "like air, or light." This shared field of knowledge resembled a commons. And a radical distinction had to be made between the act of mechanical or chemical invention, utilizing this commons, and the act of literary or artistic authorship. The distinction was clear, MacFie and his allies claimed, from the fact that simultaneous or near-simultaneous invention was by no means a rare event, whereas the very idea of simultaneous authorship was absurd. Almost every significant invention since the printing press had been claimed by several rivals; by contrast, it was ridiculous to imagine that any two authors could have "invented" the Divine Comedy.
According to the abolition camp, industrial-age humans in general (although not all humans in all ages) possessed a built-in urge to invent. There was therefore no need for a patents regime to stimulate them. If anything, the system risked overstimulating the inventive faculty, and leading unwary artisans into excessive speculation, monomania, debt, and ruin. This contention reflected a proclaimed commitment-one common to both abolitionists and defenders - to the so-called workmaninventor. This much-debated figure was reputedly each side's major intended beneficiary The main problem was distinguishing genuine worker-inventors from "schemers." The latter were workers who rashly neglected their vocations in a quest to develop a single, spectacularly successful invention to lift them out of poverty at one stroke. The patenting system, abolitionists claimed, encouraged this gambling mentality, which all too often led only to the workhouse. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was particularly outspoken on this theme. Even when such figures did create genuinely patent-worthy inventions, they were said to find themselves locked into a "racing system" to get a patent, competing with unscrupulous rivals who would do anything to appropriate their achievements. In those circumstances, should the patent system really encourage the unrealistic belief that inventing could substitute for a profession, or a business?
The antipatent campaigners historicized this account of invention and progress. They typically claimed not that inventing was (in and of itself) a cumulative, collective, and methodical process, but that it had become one. Grove, for example, conceded that patents had been broadly successful "in the earlier period of the history of invention," but claimed to see "fundamental objections to its efficient working in the present state of civilisation." "In an early period, when the patent law first grew into existence, inventive genius was rare," he explained. "Now the case is widely different; inventors are so numerous, the progress ofphysical science has made such vast strides, that it is, at all events with regard to a great number of inventions, a question only ofweeks or months when an invention is to be made." Modern inventing had come into being only with the development of modern scientific methods and rapid communications by steamship, railway and telegraph. This implied a quasi-positivist account of history, in terms ofprogressive stages. Patents might have been useful once - so those who revered