[CrackMonkey] "... are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."

[Nick Moffitt]

----- Forwarded message from glen mccready <gkm at blackdown.org> -----
Forwarded-by: Nev Dull <nev at bostic.com>
Forwarded-by: Guy Harris <guy at netapp.com>

Thomas Jefferson on patents and the like:

	http://odur.let.rug.nl/%7Eusa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl220.htm

"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 any
body.

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."


----- End forwarded message -----

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