Against Intellectual Monopoly

the same experiment in France is
more favorable to copyright. In France, the precopyright period is 1700-68,
and the postcopyright period is 1783-1849. Scherer's data are in Table 8.2.
    Here we find that, in France, when copyright was introduced the number
of composers per million increased substantially more than in other countries. This should be noted, as it is pretty much the only piece of evidence
supporting the idea that copyright increased classical music production that
we have been able to find.
    Looking more broadly at the entire European scene and at the careers of
comparable composers living with or without copyright protection, Scherer
finds it difficult to conclude that copyright law was a significant factor, either
way, in determining the amount of musical composition taking place. It may
not have reduced the incentive to compose music, but it certainly did not
increase it either: whatever the mechanism affecting composers' incentives,
copyright protection was not an important part of it.
Patents and Innovation in the Nineteenth Century
    Kenneth Sokoloff, together with Naomi Lamoreaux and Zorina Khan, examined the role of patents in the United States in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. In 1836, the United States
    instituted an examination system under which, before granting patents, technical
experts scrutinized applications for novelty and for the appropriateness of claims
about invention. This procedure made patent rights more secure by increasing the
likelihood that a grant for a specified technologywould survive a court challenge, and
may also have provided some signal about the significance of the new technology.
Thereafter, both patenting and sales of patent rights boomed.'
    Subsequently, they document the development of an elaborate system of
trading ideas. This includes both specialized intermediaries and journals
advertising the existence of patents. Some of these intermediaries not only assisted inventors in obtaining patents but, in some cases, also seem to have
acted as modern-day venture capitalists, providing start-up funding to put
ideas into production.

    As a study of innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this research is of great interest. It does not, however, provide much
evidence that the patent system promotes innovation relative to a competitive system where property rights for inventors and imitators are well
defined and the right to sell voluntarily is enforced. The aim of this research
is to show that the patent system introduced in the United States after the
1830s created a well-defined market for patents and technologies that did
not exist previously, and that the creation of such market lead to an increase
in the number of patents registered and traded. It should be observed that
the institutional change that led to the booming of patenting and the sales of
patent rights was to make it more difficult to get patents - quite the opposite
of modern institutional changes. In addition, although this research makes
it clear that the number of patent agents and inventors making use of their
services boomed, it also documents that an important portion of the services were to assist inventors in getting patents and in navigating the thicket
of existing patents - socially wasteful activities that would be unnecessary
in the absence of a patent system.
    One important difficulty is in determining the level of innovative activity.
One measure is the number of patents, of course, but this is meaningless
in a country that has no patents or when patent laws change. Petra Moser
gets around this problem by examining the catalogs of innovations from
nineteenth-century world's fairs. Of the cataloged innovations, some are
patented, some are not, some are from countries with patent systems, and
some are from countries without. Moser catalogs more than thirty thousand innovations from a variety of industries: "Mid-nineteenth century
Switzerland [a country without patents], for example, had the second highest number of exhibits per capita among all countries that visited the Crystal
Palace Exhibition. Moreover, exhibits from countries without patent laws
received disproportionate shares of medals for outstanding innovations."
Moser does, however, find a significant impact of patent law on the direction
of innovation:
    The analysis of exhibition data suggests that patent laws may be an important
factor in