Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [237]
Jewett and Bush made explicit the stakes of the TNEC investigations. They stood to reconfigure the relation between research and the economy. In that context it is remarkable that AT&T, Jewett, and Bush all abandoned the most long-standing arguments for intellectual property. The old claims about labor and first occupation vanished. More significant still is the fact that none resorted to the traditional alternative to such arguments, namely, the figure of the Romantic author. On the contrary, they insisted on the demise, or at least the terminal decline, of this figure. They occasionally invoked "the inventor," but almost always in elegiac fashion, as someone made obsolete by the great industrial and institutional laboratories with their team-based practices. The nature of science -of knowledge-was different now. Patents existed, apparently, to sustain these new, collective institutions. Indeed, it was the antipatent camp that made much of the individual inventor. In the twentieth century the Romantic author had to be protected against intellectual property. Harvard economist Alvin Hansen, for example, condemned patenting on this basis as threatening the national character.15
The committee concluded that the patent system had enabled monopolists "to control whole industries, to suppress competition, to restrict output, to enhance prices, to suppress inventions, and to discourage inventiveness." New Dealers like Walter Kaempffert, a prominent antipatent voice at the New York Times, agreed, demanding that America "abandon" a science defined by capitalist incentives in this way. But by now it was too late for mere administrative measures. War was at hand. The imperatives of military mobilization trumped all. Roosevelt consolidated the AT&T investigation and the TNEC -along with several other bodies -into a single National Patent Planning Commission. He charged it with a fundamental revision of the culture of research.16
Daniel Kevles has traced in detail the process that led from this point to the inauguration of a postwar scientific order. Briefly, leadership of the antipatenting camp fell to a West Virginia senator, Harley Kilgore, who proposed a "Science Mobilization Act" to create an office empowered to override patents in the national interest. The agency would also coordinate grants to research institutions, which it would distribute partly in accord with social needs. Thurman Arnold proclaimed the plan a "magna carta of science." But it met with bitter enmity from industry, from the military, and even from the sciences themselves. Bush, by now leading the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was especially antagonistic. He decried the prospect of laypeople judging research proposals - the very element that most exemplified New Deal ambitions to entrench the social responsibility of science. Moreover, Kilgore wanted private rights to be void if any public funding had been used in a project, which to Bush reeked of the radical antipatenting sensibility of the FCC.17 His own vision for science rested on corporate collaboration with the state, and he believed that patents were essential if this were to become a reality. Their confrontation eventually gave rise to the institutions definitive of postwar American science.
Kilgore retooled his proposal into what he called a National Science Foundation, retaining what he regarded