Posts Tagged: "promote the progress"

One just thinks of the fact that five years ago Blackberry was the industry standard, dominant forever, and now it is basically exposed to ridicule because virtually it’s dropped to third or fourth on the distribution list. You look at the rate of technological progress between then and now, it just doesn’t seem in any way, shape or form to have been slowed down so it seems to me that in face of rapid technological advance to say that the current system is a disaster is a mistake.

The reality is that from 1790 to 1836 patents were given to the first to file. Between 1836 and 1870 a panel of arbitrators would decide disputes between conflicting patents and patent applications, but were not required to grant the patent to the first and true inventor. Moreover, even with the passage of the Patent Act of 1870, the first act that specifically and unambiguously gives the Patent Office the authority to grant a patent to one who is not the first to file, the power to grant to the first to invent is conditional, not mandatory. This permissive language persists through the Patent Act of 1939, and ultimately into the regime we have today, which was ushered in by the 1952 Patent Act.

The man who secretes his invention makes easier and plainer the path of no one. He contributes nothing to the public. Over and over has it been repeated that the object of the patent system is, through protection, to stimulate inventions, and inventors ought to understand that this is for the public good. Where an invention is made and hidden away, it might as well never have been made at all,–at least so far as the public is concerned. The law owes nothing to such an inventor, and to permit him to lie in wait, so to speak, for one who, independently and in good faith, proceeds to make and disclose to the public the same invention, would be both unjust and against the policy of the patent laws. In the eyes of the law he is not the prior inventor.

The United States Constitution grants to the Congress the power to grant patents; this power residing in the Congress is found in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8. Unlike most of the enumerated powers granted to Congress in the Constitution, the Intellectual Property Clause is a qualified grant of power, which does limit Congressional discretion in significant ways. The Congress does not have free reign to decide that patents should be easily or freely given, but rather must limit their exercise of power to the dictates of the clause itself. See Bonito Boats, Inc. v. Thunder Craft Boats, Inc., 489 U.S. 141, 146 (1989). See also Graham v. John Deere Co. of Kansas City, 383 U.S. 1, 5 (1966) (“The clause is both a grant of power and a limitation. This qualified authority, unlike the power often exercised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the English Crown, is limited to the promotion of advances in the ‘useful arts.’”).

As James Madison stated in Federalist Paper No. 43, the usefulness of the Congresses power to award both patents and copyrights “will scarcely be questioned.” Madison, Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, at 512-13 (Hunt and Scott ed. 1920). Given that today’s business world is increasingly based on a company’s ability to innovate and acquire intangible assets in the form of both copyrights and patents, it would appear as if the constitutional goal of stimulating creativity and invention has been wildly successful.