Patent Law Quotes
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 principle justified the Government in allowing a local Indonesian company to manufacture anti-AIDS drugs without paying licensing rates demanded by the drug companies that held the patents. The principle is that patent rights and the desire to profit should not supersede the rights of people to continue to live because they cannot afford the drugs to keep them alive. The local manufacturers provide the drugs to the government at cost of manufacture which is a tiny proportion of the price the patent owner charges.
