🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct27.054925.2441@udel.edu> berryh@huey.udel.edu (John Berryhill, Ph.D.) writes:
>I have a piece of paper that says I own my house and a certain amount of
>land around it.

Actually, in a certain sense you don't own your house (at least not in the
US).

   1) The federal government has the right of "eminent domain", which means
      it can take your real estate from you whenever it feels there is a
      justified reason.

   2) You pay property taxes on your real estate every year.  If you don't
      the government can foreclose on it or seize other assets.

You are essentially paying rent on property from which you can be evicted
at any time.  I'd hardly say that the federal government respects the right
to property---at least not real estate.

From another article on the same subject you write:
>"Promoting science and the useful arts" does not equate to "beneficial to
>society."  It may surprise you to learn that lots of inventors patent lots
>of things for no reason whatsoever other than they think they'll make a
>few bucks if they can keep other people from doing it.  Some things get
>invented that way that might not get invented otherwise, but that has ZIP
>to do with "beneficial to society."

   That they do it, or that the PTO lets them do it does not make it right.
The Constitution may not use "beneficial to society" in exact words, but
there is good reason to believe that that is the intent.

   These Supreme Court quotations demonstrate the principle that the US
patent system exists to modify the behavior of certain individuals for the
sake of the public good, and not for the sake of patent holders.

   In Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), still the leading Supreme
Court ruling on applying the obviousness standard, the Court through
Justice Tom Clark (father of Ramsey Clark, by the way), said:

   "....the federal patent power stems from a specific constitutional
provision...(which)...is both a grant of power and a limitation....limited
to promotion of advances in "the useful arts.".....The Congress in the
exercise of patent power may not overreach the restraints imposed by the
stated constitutional purpose.  Nor may it enlarge the patent monopoly
without regard to the innovation, advancement, or social benefit gained
thereby."-383 U.S.at 5-6

   The Supreme Court went on to discuss the views of Thomas Jefferson who
was the first administrator of the U.S. patent system and himself a noted
inventor of improvements in plows and other things.  Clark quoted (at 383
U.S. 8, n.2) an Aug. 1813 letter of Jefferson to Isaac McPherson:

   "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in
progress of society.  It would be curious then, if an idea, fungible
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 nmoment it is divulged, it
forces itself into 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 lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should 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 of society, without claim or
complaint from anybody." 
-VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson at 180-181 (Washington edition).

   In Breener v. Manson, 383 U.S. 519 (1966), the Supreme Court denied
patentability for a process of making a steroid which had no then known use
and speaking through Justice Fortas, said:

   "Whatever weight is attached to the value of encouraging disclosure and
inhibiting secrecy, we believe that a more compelling consideration is that
a process patent in the chemical field, which has not been developed and
pointed to the degree of specific utility, creates a monopoly of knowledge
which should be granted only if clearly commanded by the statute.  Until...
reduced to production of a product shown to be useful, the metes and bounds
of that monopoly are not capable of precise delineation.  It may engross a
vast unknown, and perhaps unknowable area.  Such a patent may confer power
to block off whole areas of scientific development (footnote), without
compensating benefit to the public...."-- 383 U.S. at 534.