Patents: The Ultimate Monopoly?
A patent is a government-granted monopoly. Everybody is madly in love with the concept of patenting something. It seems quintessentially American, that if you invent something you ought to have exclusive rights to making money 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 still is a monopoly, and monopolies aren’t about genius and innovation. Monopolies are about maximizing the extraction of wealth and dominating the marketplace to expand economic power. Monopolies also have the unfortunate but all too natural historic consequence of becoming political brokers and power centers in their own right, further stifling competition and innovation.
This is something that the advocates of the normal free enterprise system, as typically accepted by most, fail to consider. Patent laws, whatever their plans, have come to serve monopolistic interests, stifling innovation. Patent laws constitute a veritable underbrush of hurdles that force newcomers to spend plenty of their valuable start-up capital on lawyers and legal research. What patent laws essentially do, in practice, is guarantee profits for the already-rich and well-off. That someone not moneyed may benefit from these laws is entirely 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 proverbial little inventors are exactly those most mistreated by current patent laws. The central and in a number of ways only reason for a patent system goes out the window when we look at the exact aftermath of these laws. For piracy and intellectual property theft is as rampant as ever, despite even the purported billions that diverse industries claim to spend on combating such crimes. So crime is not forestalled or maybe deterred. But it’s the tiny businessperson or girl with a Better Mousetrap who is restrained.
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