Economics Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
| |||
|
| |||
| Patents: Patents are legal protections granted to inventors, giving them exclusive rights to produce, use, or sell their inventions for a specified period (usually 20 years). In exchange, inventors must publicly disclose the details of their inventions. Patents encourage innovation by protecting intellectual property and providing a temporary monopoly to reward creativity and investment in research. See also Inventions, Copyright, Property._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
| Author | Concept | Summary/Quotes | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Murray N. Rothbard on Patents - Dictionary of Arguments
Rothbard III 745 Patents/Rothbard: E.g., You have patented your invention and you read in the newspaper one day that John Doe, who lives in a City 2,000 miles from your town, has invented an identical or similar device, that he has licensed the EZ company to manufacture it.... Neither Doe nor the EZ company ... ever heard of your invention. All believe Doe to be the inventor of a new and original device. They may all be guilty of infringing your patent ... the fact that their infringement was in ignorance of the true facts and unintentional will not constitute a defense.(1) Rothbard: Patent, then, has nothing to do with implicit theft. It confers an exclusive privilege on the first inventor, and if anyone else should, quite independently, invent the same or similar machine or product, the latter would be debarred by violence from using it in production. Cf. >Copyright/Rothbard. Rothbard III 747 VsPatents: Part of the patent protection now obtained by an inventor could be achieved on the free market by a type of "copyright" protection. Thus, inventors must now mark their machines as being patented. Free market: The patent is incompatible with the free market precisely to the extent that it goes beyond the copyright. The man who has not bought a machine and who arrives at the same invention independently, will, on the free market, be perfectly able to use and sell his invention. Patents prevent a man from using his invention even though all the property is his and he has not stolen the invention, either explicitly or implicitly, from the first inventor. >Free market/Rothbard. Monopoly privilege: Patents, therefore, are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasive of property rights on the market. The crucial distinction between patents and copyrights, then, is not that one is mechanical and the other literary [ a book]. The fact that they have been applied that way is an historical accident and does not reveal the critical difference between them.(2) The crucial difference is that copyright is a logical attribute of property right on the free market, while patent is a monopoly invasion of that right. >Monopolies/Rothbard. Inventions/copyright/patent/Rothbard: The application of patents to mechanical inventions and copyrights to literary works is peculiarly inappropriate. It would be more in keeping with the free market to be just the reverse. For literary creations are unique products of the individual; it is almost impossible for them to be independently duplicated by someone else. Rothbard III 748 Therefore, a patent, instead of a copyright, for literary productions would make little difference in practice. On the other hand, mechanical inventions are discoveries of natural law rather than individual creations, and hence similar independent inventions occur all the time.(3) The simultaneity of inventions is a familiar historical fact. Hence, if it is desired to maintain a free market, it is particularly important to allow copyrights, but not patents, for mechanical inventions. Rothbard III 750 Monopoly privileges: Some defenders of patents assert that they are not monopoly privileges, but simply property rights in inventions or even in "ideas." But (…) everyone's property right is defended in libertarian law without a patent. If someone has an idea or plan and constructs an invention, and it is stolen from his house, the stealing is an act of theft illegal under general law. On the other hand, patents actually invade the property rights of those independent discoverers of an idea or invention who made the discovery after the patentee. Patents, therefore, invade rather than defend property rights. The speciousness of this argument that patents protect property rights in ideas is demonstrated by the fact that not all, but only certain types of original ideas, certain types of innovations, are considered patentable. Society/common good: Another common argument for patents is that "society" is simply making a contract with the inventor to purchase his secret, so that "society" will have use of it. RothbardVs: 1) (…) "society" could pay a straight subsidy, or price, to the inventor; it would not have to prevent all later inventors from marketing their inventions in this field. 2) (…) there is nothing in the free economy to prevent any individual or group of individuals from purchasing secret inventions from their creators. No monopolistic patent is necessary. Utilitarianism: The most popular argument for patents among economists is the utilitarian one that a patent for a certain number of years is necessary to encourage a suffcient amount of research expenditure for inventions and innovations in processes and products. RothbardVs: This is a curious argument, because the question immediately arises: By what standard do you judge that research expenditures are "too much," "too little," or just about enough? This is a problem faced by every governmental intervention in the market's production. >Interventions/Rothbard. Rothbard III 751 Interventions/inventions/Rothbard: Many advocates of patents believe that the ordinary competitive conditions of the market do not suffciently encourage the adoption of new processes and that therefore innovations must be coercively promoted by the government. RothbardVs: But the market decides on the rate of introduction of new processes just as it decides on the rate of industrialization of a new geographic area. In fact, this argument for patents is very similar to the infant-industry argument for tariffs - that market processes are not suffcient to permit the introduction of worthwhile new processes. >Research expenditures. Rothbard III 751 Patents/Rothbard: It is by no means self-evident that patents encourage an increased absolute quantity of research expenditures. Rothbard III 752 But certainly patents distort the type of research expenditure being conducted. For while it is true that the first discoverer benefits from the privilege, it is also true that his competitors are excluded from production in the area of the patent for many years. And since one patent can build upon a related one in the same field, competitors can often be indefinitely discouraged fromfurther research expenditures in the general area covered by the patent. Moreover, the patentee is himself discouraged from engaging in further research in this field (…). 1. Irving Mandell, How to Protect and Patent Your Invention (New York: Oceana Publishers, 1951), p. 34. 2. This can be seen in the field of designs, which can be either copyrighted or patented. 3. For a legal hint on the proper distinction between copyright and monopoly, see F.E. Skone James, “Copyright” in Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed.; London, 1929), VI, 415–16. For the views of nineteenth-century economists on patents, see Fritz Machlup and Edith T. Penrose, “The Patent Controversy in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History, May, 1950, pp. 1–29. Also see Fritz Machlup, An Economic Review of the Patent System (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1958)._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Rothbard II Murray N. Rothbard Classical Economics. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Cheltenham 1995 Rothbard III Murray N. Rothbard Man, Economy and State with Power and Market. Study Edition Auburn, Alabama 1962, 1970, 2009 Rothbard IV Murray N. Rothbard The Essential von Mises Auburn, Alabama 1988 Rothbard V Murray N. Rothbard Power and Market: Government and the Economy Kansas City 1977 |
||
Authors A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Concepts A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
