More from the series Connections, host James Burke asserts that inventions normally come out of religion, the environment, war or accident, accident being the most prolific. For the other categories, it is all solving problems of some sort. In the case of religion, it may be with their unique means for aggregating capital through voluntary association (the monastery) they we able to work on solutions better than others (and this monastery phenomenon is worldwide). ,
What Edison introduced was the invention of inventing. He applied technology and his rules dwelt on here, and gained 1100 patents, and in spite of going bankrupt once, lived and died a rich man. His laboratories in Menlo Park, New Jersey were emulated in what is now the Silicon Valley, centered in a town named Menlo Park, California.
Edison is also deemed a thief, for stealing other's ideas. The entire Connections series make very clear all ideas are based on others works, and it seems about ten people contribute to one successful invention.
Now I am not complaining that Edison "stole" any ideas, or how he came by them. I am the first to admit nothing in my book, that has sold consistently for ten years, is mine. I simply put down what I learned from others, and worked for me. My book on Perish Your Publisher is full of arranging what everyone else invented to serve teaching and writing one's way to paid publication.
What I object to is "stealing an idea" (something that cannot really be done because ideas are not property) and slamming the door on others' desire to exploit knowledge by filing for patents. Those ten people feeding Edison ideas, should Edison begin to exploit an idea in the market, would then see an opportunity, and compete with Edison. What was competition in research now becomes competition in the market.
Now note, this is where the benefit meets the consumer, in the market. And this is where the market speaks. Due to market feedback, improvements come. Before patents, just about every invention introduced, was tinkered with for slow, sure improvement. With patents, the door is slammed on the benefit the market provides, and we are stuck with inadequate version of goods and services with no means to improve them. Look at nuclear power plants, automobiles, medicine and agriculture and see the horrors of patent regime control. Dangerous, high prices, scarce, not very good.
But probably more important, although we cannot measure it, is what we do not see. I have met countless people who have inventions that will never see the light of day because they are prohibited by prior patent protection from going into manufacture. Different, but too close. And it is precisely this "difference" that is the nuancing that leads to division of labor and full employment. We need these slightly different versions on the market, or at least need to the market to consider them.
Another problem is wasted effort. Under US patent regime, we are obliged to keep our ideas secret until they are released for commercialization, a difference in our law to European patent regime. So terribly talented people strive in utter secrecy, to come up with well worked over ideas, only to find when ultimately, but first time presented to the market, there is no demand for this invention. Of they nearly 7 million patents issued since 1789 in USA, almost nothing patented ever turns into a product on the market. What a tremendous waste! We are denied the benefit of these people's genius, where in a free market system, their ideas would be tested every step of the way, pay as you go, benefit as we proceed. (For libertarians of the Randian sort, Ayn Rand developed a massive argument in favor of the US patent regime. Except she kept referring to the European regime, not knowing there is a difference. Ooops.)
And then there some cases of once invented, approved for patent, but may not be exploited commercially. For example you are free to develop a chair back for a three legged stool (and let's pretend there is a patent on the three legged stool). Now you chair back is patented, but you do not have the right to make and sell these chair backs, because the fellow with the patent on the three-legged stool has the right to stop you from abusing his "property right" on the three legged stool.
What we need is not patent protection, but free markets and competition and price reduction. It is precisely this phenomena of price reduction that so offends pro-IPR people. In a free market we get more better cheaper faster or any new idea. But in a free market, no one gets exceptionally wealthy. In a free market we are all exceptionally wealthy because the price of just about everything is within the reach of the income we earn doing what we do, or at least satisfactory versions. There will always be people who have more from their efforts, who drink better wine from silver goblets, but everyone will have good wine from good glass. We will have what Gandhi referred to as "one-generation industrialists" (the term for billionaires in his time) people who make it but since it is excessive, lose it as easily due to inability to control all that excess wealth. In a free market, there is no taxing poor people to guard the wealth of the rich. The rich have to keep playing, and over time, their faculties falter, and the wealth is spread wider and wider. The go out the way they came in, like everyone else.
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