Patricia Hewitt Quotes

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.

support … continued widespread innovation by resisting the wider application of patents

We believe that patents exist to reward the inventors of truly outstanding ideas, not to allow big businesses to stifle competition with an ever-growing tide of trivial, incomprehensible, overreaching patents. We will stop the abuse of patent law by raising the bar on how innovative an idea has to be before it can be patented, and by prohibiting patents on software, business methods, concepts and works of nature. We will require a working model to be provided to the patent office before a patent is granted and we will strictly enforce the current rule that patents are invalid if they are "obvious to someone skilled in the art".

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

Lincoln said that the Patent Office adds the flame of interest to the light of creativity. And that is why we need to improve the effectiveness of our Patent Office.

At the present time, when railways, the telegraph, the telephone, to say nothing of other inventions and improvements of importance, have simplified communication between all lands and nations to the last degree, there is scarcely any reason to fear either distance or the estrangement of the several parts of a single whole. Practically distance is almost nonexistent. What to our ancestors appeared simply near at hand now seems to lie immediately before our eyes

Shall an invention be patented or donated to the public freely? I have known some well-meaning scientific men ... to look askance at the patenting of inventions, as if it were a rather selfish and ungracious act, essentially unworthy. The answer is very simple. Publish an invention freely, and it will almost surely die from lack of interest in its development. It will not be developed and the world will not be benefited. Patent it, and if valuable, it will be taken up and developed into a business.

The Constitution never sanctioned the patenting of gadgets. Patents serve a higher end—the advance of science.

Intellectual property is the oil of the 21 century. Look at the richest men a hundred years ago; they all made their money extracting natural resources or moving them around. All today's richest men have made their money out of intellectual property.

At Linkabit, we put little effort and energy into patenting things.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek,' that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.

When you look at the actual data on technological innovation, one thing you see is that what I call the 'low-hanging fruit' has been exhausted. So radio, flush toilets, electricity, and automobiles - a lot of very basic inventions - have spread to almost all households.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

When we began Qualcomm, it had become quite clear that it was very important to patent new ideas.

I declined it. As we enjoy great advantage from the invention of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

A country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab and couldn't travel anyway but sideways and backwards.

Patents have not been a positive force in stimulating innovation at Cisco. Competition has been the motivator; bringing new products to market in a timely manner is critical. Everything we have done to create new products would have been done even if we could not obtain patents

Technological innovation is so miserable in the Middle East that, if you exclude Israel, the number of patents filed is less than one fifth the number from sub-Saharan Africa.

In America, innovation does not just improve our lives. It is the way we make our living.

The patent system was established to encourage inventors to disclose the details of their inventions. Its purpose was to help society rather than to help inventors. At the time, the life span of 17 years for a patent was short compared with the rate of advance of the state of the art. Since patents are an issue only among manufacturers, for whom the cost and effort of a license agreement are small compared with setting up production, the patents often do not do much harm. They do not obstruct most individuals who use patented products.

A society without civil, political, and property rights may indeed find it difficult to innovate innovation outside the military sector, but it often has a relatively easy time adopting technologies that have already been developed elsewhere.

As humans, we've always innovated our way out of problems, whether it was the first torch to light a dark cave or the steam engine that sparked a revolution.

Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it's much more important than free trade.

Every time you think all the technology that had been created already, all you have to do is look around and then there's someone new who's born with a new idea.