Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [232]
INDUSTRY, SCIENCE, AND THE COMMON GOOD
In interwar America, as now, industry and science were joined together by patents. Major corporations owed their existence to their creation, purchase, control, and manipulation. They had begun to create major laboratories out ofwhat had previously been patent divisions, and in truth (although not always in rhetoric) these labs remained dedicated primarily to creating more patents. They also notoriously sought to "fence off" their economic territory from competition by deploying patent rights, and to buy up any such rights that they did not create - although the extent to which this really cramped competition was endlessly debatable. Two broad kinds of question came to dog the enterprise of industrial research as a result. First, was the work done in an institution like Bell Labsfounded in 1925 and effectively owned by AT&T- really science, and if so, by what definition? If the answer seemed relatively clear for Bell Labs, it was far less so for the other 1,500 or so industrial laboratories in existence by the late 1930s, many ofwhich made none of the same claims to encourage open-ended inquiry. The second question derived from this. Were patent practices socially beneficial at a time ofwidespread hardship - indeed, they were legal at all? If the answers to these questions were no, then the patent system might need radical reform, or even obliteration. And science and its relation to the common weal might be at stake.
The favorite proposalwas not for outright abolition, however- although avocal minority did seek that-but for some form ofcompulsory licensing. This was a conscious revival of the idea developed in nineteenth-century Britain. It had long attracted support in the United States, despite the objection ofpatentees like Edison that stories ofpatent suppression never stood up to scrutiny. In i9i9, for example, an economics professor at Brown University named Floyd Vaughan investigated the uses of patents at great length, and concluded that the evils of the system might well offset the benefits. Every industrial power except the United States now embraced compulsory licensing, he pointed out, recommending that readers seek out MacFie's old arguments to see why. Others added that there was ample precedent, extending back to Elizabethan England, for overturning patents that were not being "worked." By the 193os, after years of such arguments, Congress was actively considering legislation to impose compulsory licensing.2 If it did not pass, critics threatened, then the system should be done away with.
The literature comprising this "patents question" grew to be immense. Its very size testifies to the importance of the issues at hand. In fact, the renewed battle over the principle of patenting had become a focal point for a perceived crisis of capitalism, democracy, and science themselves. Its background lay in the rise of "trusts" before World War I. The Pennsylvania Railroad and Standard Oil were the iconic examples of these mammoth corporations, which emerged initially in fields involving the distribution of materials or messages across large distances, for which standardization on a continental scale was a prerequisite. Rail pioneered the gigantism, followed by telegraphy, telephony, oil, and electricity New forms of organization and economic rationality appeared in these immense companies, which employed mundane communication and storage devices like memos and file cards, and a new"science of management," to hold themselves together.3 Moreover, after a period of antitrust politics, in the 1920S concentration had once again been vaunted as a natural and beneficial process in the new