Patents and the sharing of ideas

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a thoughtful piece on Why Technologists Want Fewer Patents. Gordon Crovitz's column used the Supreme Court decision to review the Bilski case on business process patents (see earlier posting) to raise an often overlooked function of the system: the sharing of information:

The Supreme Court may decide that more progress would be made with narrower definitions of what is patentable. A book on the U.S. approach to patents, "Jefferson vs. the Patent Trolls" by Jeffrey Matsuura, makes the key point that "intellectual property rights were not goals in and of themselves, but were instead a mechanism through which society attempted to facilitate creative collaboration."
Thomas Jefferson, the nation's inventor-president, would support patent reform in an era when new information technologies build on themselves. An idea, he observed, is a rare thing whose value increases as it's shared. "No one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it," he wrote. "He who receives an idea from me receives it without lessening me, as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

The very explicit deal embedded in the idea of a patent is disclosure in return for limited protection. Otherwise, the system would work on a process of trade secrets.

It is this collaboration part of the process that gets lost in the debate -- especially by the "patents as a natural property right" crowd. Interestingly Joff Wilds's critique against the article focused on the data on patent applications and litigation costs without ever engaging in the core argument on business process patents.

There might be a typo on the patent application numbers and people do not agree on the size of litigation costs. But Crovitz got the essence of the question right: what is the purpose of patents in fostering innovation . The answer to that question is what the Supreme Court will be grappling with.