A Government Granted Monopoly
A patent is a government-granted monopoly. Everyone is madly in love with the concept of patenting something. It appears quintessentially American, that if you invent something you ought to have sole rights to making profits off it. To paraphrase President Abraham Lincoln’s own take on it, the patent system adds the fuel of self-interest to the fire of genius.
Fine. But it ’s still a monopoly, and monopolies arenot about genius and innovation. Monopolies are about maximizing the extraction of wealth and dominating the market to expand economic power. Monopolies have the unfortunate but all too natural historic result of becoming political brokers and power centres in their own right, further stifling competition and innovation.
This is something that the devotees of the conventional free enterprise system, as commonly understood by most, fail to consider. Patent laws, whatever their inclinations, have come to serve monopolistic interests, stifling innovation. Patent laws constitute a veritable underbrush of obstacles that force newcomers to spend a lot of their valuable starting capital on barristers and legal research. What patent laws basically do, in practice, is guarantee profits for the already-rich and rich. That someone not wealthy may benefit from these laws is totally incidental to the proven fact that these laws by and large serve established interests.
How does society benefit?
Not by much, in actual fact. Indeed, the familiar small inventors are exactly those most mistreated by current patent laws. The central and in a number of ways only justification for a patent system goes out the window when we look at the real effects of these laws. For piracy and intellectual property theft is as rampant as ever, regardless of even the claimed billions that various industries claim to spend on combating such crimes. So crime is not forestalled or maybe discouraged. But it’s the small entrepreneur or lady with a Better Mousetrap who is restrained.
Mail this post