The Correspondence of Thomas Jefferson
By Subject
WEALTH / PRODUCTION OF / PATENTS
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that
inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and
not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But
while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property
is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural
and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who
have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of
natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.
By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable,
belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the
moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the
occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of
social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be
curious then, if an idea, the fugitive 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 moment it is divulged, it forces
itself into the 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 who lights his taper at mine, receives light
without darkening me. That ideas should freely 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 and convenience of
the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it
is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied
her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a
legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries
it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal
act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these
monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and
it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of
invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813
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