Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [161]
Patents were therefore charged with several offenses at once. They projected an artificial idol of the single inventor, radically denigrated the role of the intellectual commons, and blocked apath to this commons for other citizens - citizens who were all, on this account, potential inventors too. They thereby denied the progressive character of industrial society Patentees were the equivalent of squatters on public land-or, better, of uncouth market traders who planted their barrows in the middle of the highway and barred the way of the people.36
The question of the inventor, finally, led straight to a corollary that was less oftenvoiced explicitly but remained critically important nonetheless. Where did "the public" stand-and what was "the" public anyway? Defenders of patents had claimed that they represented a bargain between inventor and public, such that the inventor got protection for a limited period in return for not just making the invention but revealing it, and giving it to the public at the end of that period. In that light, a patent was not an untrammeled private property held in defiance of the public, as MacFie liked to say, but actually included a public interest. But abolitionists denied that this was true in practice. To them, the interest of the patentee was in practice dominant. Patentees were under no obligation to charge reasonable royalty rates, after all, nor indeed to issue licenses at all. Some even preyed on existing manufactures. They acted, in short, as monopolists. The abolitionists claimed that the public interest was being eroded drastically, as property rights were proclaimed across more and more of the intellectual landscape encompassed by the industrial arts. At the very least, some representative of the public should be introduced into any process determining the granting and contestation of patents. Henry Dircks tackled such claims head-on in his Inventors and Inventions, published in 1867 as a direct riposte to the antipatent campaign and dedicated to Bessemer "as an Inventor and Patentee."The abolitionists' references to the public referred, he said, "not to thepublic at large, but to the manufacturers of Sheffield wares and Birmingham wares." No member of the general public was inconvenienced bypatents, "for it is to patents that the public are indebted for many luxuries and necessities unknown to our forefathers."37 Replies like this suggested that rival definitions of the public were in operation, but the abolitionist camp at first simply disdained such distinctions.
If patents were abolished, however, what would replace them? Some, like Grove in his more sanguine moments, wanted nothing at all, favoring what they saw as a true free trade in intellectual talents and products. Their bracing view was that the worker in a manufacturing plant who came up with a genuine improvement would always be rewarded by an enlightened capitalist; if he were not, he would become much more valuable to competitors, and would find his proper place in the intellectual marketplace. This was very much Brunei's view too. Empirical evidence in its favor was, it must be said, sketchy. And, perhaps for that reason, MacFie himselfwas not prepared to go so far. He wanted patents replaced by a system of rewards - both honors and cash "bounties" - to be awarded to worthy inventors by the state. He reckoned that such a system would be far cheaper to administer, and would avoid all the perils of monopoly that came with patents. As we have seen, Brewster had long wanted the state to create something of this kind, although he