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Ärende: FidoNews 25:49 [01/06]: Food For Thought
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                        FOOD FOR THOUGHT
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Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12

Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
13 Aug. 1813, Writings 13:333--35

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that
inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and
not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But
while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property
is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural
and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who
have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of
natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable,
belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the
moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the
occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be
curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual
brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable
property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an
idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps
it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into
the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess
himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses
the less, because every other possesses the whole of 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.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe,
for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his
condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by
nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space,
without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in
which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of
confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society
may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an
encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but
this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of
the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it
is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied
her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a
legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries
it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal
act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these
monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and
it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of
invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural
right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of
drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the
embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a
member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized
a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a
system of general rules could be matured.


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