| HN Mirror

I offer some insight from Thomas Jefferson, as much of my own thinking on the topic over time has converged with him, and he is, in my opinion, the superior wordsmith of the two of us.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172970

>Jefferson’s cleanest expression of his views on patents came in a weighty letter to Isaac McPherson (13 Aug. 1813) about Oliver Evan’s proposed elevator patent—a string of buckets fixed on a leather strap, for drawing up water. Is Evans’ machine his own, “his invention,” or do others have right of usage? Jefferson wasc oncerned with the machine itself, not its usage. If one person, for instance, received a patent for a knife that points pens, another could not receive a patent for the same knife for pointing pencils.

>Jefferson begins by noting he has seen similar contraptions used by numerous others—“I have used this machine for sowing Benni seed also” and intends to have other bands of buckets in use for corn and wheat—and even notes that such an elevator was in use in Ancient Egypt. He sums, “There is nothing new in these elevators but being strung together on a strap of leather.” If Evans is to be credited with anything new, “it can only extend to the strap,” yet even the leather strap was used similarly by a certain Mr. Martin of Caroline County, Virginia. There is, Jefferson is clear, nothing original in Evans’ machine.

>Jefferson, however, had more to say: many believe that “inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions,” which is “inheritable to their heirs.” Yet it “would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.”

>Why? “Whatever, fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it.” Yet when he relinquishes occupation, he relinquishes ownership. It would be strange to think that a person acquiring ownership of some property, thus, has a natural right to it. That would mean that no one has a right to the property after he perishes, and even more absurdly, that no one had a right to that property prior to him having acquired the land. “Stable ownership is the gift of social law,” and not of nature. The argument applies straightforwardly to ideas. Jefferson sums, “It would be curious then,” adds Jefferson, “if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.” The argument for patenting ideas by appealing to nature is untenable.

>Jefferson still has more to say. The analogy has its flaws. Ideas are singular. If there is anything that nature has made “less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.” Each person possesses exclusively any idea so long as it is unshared. Once shared, it belongs to everyone.

>Moreover, an idea shared is fully possessed by all who entertain it. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” The same cannot be said for property shared. It is that power of an idea, to be shared without lessening its density, which makes it a special gift of nature for “the moral and mutual instruction of man.” He sums, “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

While I understand he is not looked upon quite as favorably by many nowadays, as to the sense previously quoted, I hold vehemently he has the incontrovertible right of it, and that that which we endure nowadays as being "Intellectual Property" and the framework of legalisms around it, is an aberrant perversion of the right order of things. As himan beings, we are finite, transient creatures. In our conducting of business wherein we have provided to men (or people if you prefer) the benefit of intellectual property, we have also created non-people (legal fictions) that are nevertheless granted the benefit of holding said Intellectual property. These fictions do not die as men do, and benefit greatly, and in ways that are detrimental to the transmission of hard won experience between generations, and furthermore, perpetuates the greatest inequality of all of our time; that in a period wherein the replication of information is free, we still bind others to be ignorant that some that, if not through the virtuous action of innovating, then through acts of business; lay claim to the fruits of the innovators virtue; holding it over a fire, or throwing it in a vault, and decreeing "Humanity, thou shalt not know til my tithe is satisfied.".

In the short time we all have; deep down, I believe it is the right of the thing that all should be spread as far and wide as cans be that the seeds of ideas may find fertile soil in the minds of others in which to bloom, to being about a richer harvest for all.

Apologize for the wall of text. You asked though.