Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [244]
His own experience told him that the image was a mirage. At ICI, he recalled, he had been prevented from speaking openly to others even in the same factory. In his drafts one can see him working up from this kind of personal experience to his well-known views on the nature of science. He insisted that even in the combines real originality came not from teams, but from individuals. Often they were only hired into the team after they had made their important discoveries. This made sense, because no rational firm would give an inventor the leeway needed for all the failures necessary to produce a success. Combines thus betrayed science because, he wrote, "there is no mechanical, safe rule to discovery." If analysis could be centrally guided, he added elsewhere, it was "not research but surveying; no originality." "Very Important," he noted at one crucial point: "Usual argument: Invention, progress, is logical, determined, therefore foreseeable. While in reality: because it follows the evolution of inherent logic in steps, each of which is a maximum step ofhuman intelligence, therefore unforeseeable."31 In other words, it was not that the process was inherently irrational, but that each step took one to the limits of predictability at the moment of its being taken. And here one book manuscript ended abruptly.
The book on Scientific Method in Society took this point further by focusing on the role of secrecy in constricting the marketplace for ideas. Polanyi identified two kinds, created by states and companies. He rather wistfully considered proposing that military research be made illegal under international law, before proceeding swiftly on to the corporate kind of secrecy, which he thought more damaging to the general welfare.32 This was where patents came in. In industrial capitalism, he said, patents were really tools for cartel building. Radio was the case in point. Going further than Plant, he insisted that inventors must retain their autonomy in the face of both military secrecy and patent cartelism. It was here - a context lost from his published argument-that he started to consider their remuneration out of public funds. To the same end, moreover, Polanyi also mooted having the state roll back copyright, while subsidizing libraries and scientific publishing. Scientific progress would rest on reprinting too. What he called "habits of publicity" would become part of the normative culture of industrial research-indeed, of capitalism itself. "It will be considered as a feature of decency and dignity in industrial life," Polanyi predicted, "to let everyone benefit freely from knowledge which is obtained in the firms' research laboratories." Altogether, these moves would "pervasively refresh the intellectual atmosphere in which individual scientists spend their lives."33
Behind Polanyi's view of science was therefore a sustained and even rather agonized engagement with the fate of the researcher in a realm dominated by patent pools. It was the centrality of this concern that led him to his convictions about the central importance of tacit knowledge. It also led Polanyi to argue that science and intellectual property were fundamentally incompatible, and that patenting must be abolished. Taking up claims from Plant, the Roosevelt inquiries, and the Victorian antipatent campaign, Polanyi developed for himselfa sophisticated, libertarian ideology of open-source science.
THE PATENT AS JAMMING DEVICE
When the British Post Office used