Morning journal and courier., 1884-02-12
SOuruaI ano Courier.
SINGLE COPIES TWO GENTS.
Tuesday, February 12, 1884.
A BILL AGA1NsT INVENTORS.

A BILL AGAINST INVENTORS. The people of this State have no small interest in the bill now before Congress | which proposes to reduce the life or duration l ot patentto seven years. Connecticut is pro- life of inventors and inventions, and if this bill should become law it would directly affect great many people here.
 This proposition to shorten the term of a patent is ostensibly in the interest of the people as against patent rights and monopo. lies. and it is but fair to say that thus pre-. scented it is plausible. But it's adoption would be productive of serious results. The argu- ment against it is well and forcibly presented by writer in the National Republican of Washington. This writer points out that the principle of the patent laws is right. A man has as much right to the results of the labor of his brain as he has to those of the labor of his hands. In both cases the results are property in which the man who has produced it has an indefensible right to ownership and protection. Often the results of brain labor are more valuable than those of hand labor. and correspondingly more worthy of protec- tion. This principle is recognized in the copyright law, and is otherwise formulated in the patent laws. The patent laws, he says further, have been a great stimulus to the inventive genius of the country. By securing to in ventors in advance for a term of years the results of their labor, they have offered a standing reward to the efforts of educated talent and the struggles of impoverished genius. Their value in this regard is simply inestimable, and can only be approximated by refecting how few of the labor-saving and wealth-producing inventions of the age, mum bering thousands, would probably have been produced without the hope of reward held out by the patent laws.
 Seven years would be very short time to grant patent for. As the writer above quoted from says: Often it takes fully that length of time to introduce valuable patent -to get it before the public and make the people acquainted with it's merits This process is generally difficult, and the first few years in the life of patent are apt to be not only unremunerative, but very expensive, hard and trying to the patentee. The reward comes later. Perhaps it would be safe to say that in the case of most valuable pat
 
 are occupied in introducing and pushing them, the profit being mainly confined to the latter half of their term And it is a mistake to assume that while the inventor or owner of a valuable patent is benefited the public is being robbed or plundered It is true the people who buy or a patented article pay the owner for the talent, time, labor and money he has invested in produc- ing it, just as they do the author of book whose work is protected by copyright, but they get the benefit of the invention What would the country be to day without the patented reapers, movers, cultivators, and many other labor-saving machines which have become so indispensable factor in modern farming? It is true the inventors of these machines have received 8 liberal reward, and made handsome fortunes out of them, but the people who use them and the country at large. have profited enormously.
 Under the present law the duration of 8 patent is seventeen years Originally it was fourteen years, with provision for extension, in certain cases for seven years longer In England patents are granted for twenty-one years. And iu spite of monopolies we should much rather see the term in this country in- creased to twenty Lone years than reduced to seven.