Guy Standing Quotes
The IP system is an artificial construct that excessively rewards owners of intellectual property, granting them monopolies over inventions and ideas that, in many cases, are the product of generations of thinkers and/or publicly funded research.
Standing, Guy. The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay. Biteback Publishing, 2016.
Many people believe that patents—especially in the high technology arena—actually inhibit innovation.
When Secretary of State, Jefferson ran the first American Patent Office. The Patent system was originally and educational program, not an intellectual property program. Inventors would keep all their technological secrets to themselves. The idea behind the original patent system was to give an inventor a limited monopoly on profiting from his invention in exchange for sharing his information and techniques with his countrymen—thus improving the technological competency of the entire society. The very first patents were available for public inspection for that reason. And even today, copies of patents are available easily for almost no cost. And few American ideas worked as well as our early patent system. Through its educational role and technology transfer, America came from technological nowhere to being the pre-eminent inventing nation of the world. The balance between public access to invention and innovation and preservation of some rights to the creator of intellectual property is key to modern development.
This quotation is an excellent statement of one major viewpoint about patents. However there are others who disagree and many who believe the existing patent system is broken and inhibits innovation. They observe that the vast majority of patents never are developed or reach the public. They also point to major counter-examples to Thomson’s view. The best is the PC which IBM developed and decided NOT to patent it, to encourage people to produce programs, applications and many devices. No product in human history has been more thoroughly developed and adopted by as many people as quickly. More capital investment money has been invested that any other invention. There are many examples where Thompson’s point holds. Vaccines for which there is no patent have not obtained any company who would manufacture it despite the need. The issue is complex with the old view of Thomson certainly not correct, but not entirely wrong either.
This would seem a much easier solution to the problem of monopoly holders charging outrageous prices than trying to fix profits or lay a large tax on the profits. However, few governments ever do this. In many cases the patent holders control or heavily influence the government. There is in addition, in most Judeo-Christian societies an assumption that most people have a moral sense and will not take undue advantage of customers just because they have the power to do so. And in the most egregious cases of monopoly pricing there were many other patents where the inventors were not gouging the consumers. It is always been the minority of businesses that have taken gross advantage of patent monopolies. However at some periods, where there was an oligarchy, all the companies in an area abused their patent monopolies together. An example would be the pharmaceutical industry of the early 21st century.
Guthrie was one of the many people who used the copyright law to prevent someone else from restricting the information and allowing wide utilization of their proprietary material. This is sometimes called “copyleft.” This quotation collection is another example of copyrighted material with broad encouragement of utilization.
