Against Intellectual Monopoly

4,500°F.
    • U.S. Patent No. 6,004,596: the sealed, crustless peanut butter and jelly
sandwich.
    • U.S. Patent No. 5,616,089: "A method of putting features the golfer's
dominant hand so that the golfer can improve control over putting
speed and direction."
    • U.S. Patent No. 6,368,227: "A method of swing on a swing is disclosed,
in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two
chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side
motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other."
    • U.S. Patent No. 6,219,045, from the press release by Worlds.com: " [The
patent was awarded] for its scalable 3D server technology ... [by] the
United States Patent Office. The Company believes the patent may
apply to currently, in use, multi-user games, e-Commerce, web design,
advertising and entertainment areas of the Internet."45 This is a refreshing admission that instead of inventing something new, Worlds.com
simply patented something already widely used.
    • U.S. Patent No. 6,025,810: "The present invention takes a transmission
of energy, and instead of sending it through normal time and space, it
pokes a small hole into another dimension, thus, sending the energy
through a place which allows transmission of energy to exceed the
speed of light." The mirror image of patenting stuff already in use:
patent stuff that can't possibly work.
Comments
    This chapter used to be much longer and was crammed full of additional
examples of the patent system gone crazy. We decided to cut many of them,
as we felt that readers did not need to be overwhelmed with horror stories to
see the general point. Two of the expunged stories, though, are particularly
amusing and one of us cannot resist the temptation to at least provide two quick additional examples. A very recent one has to do with a patent
covering the idea of having breakfast by mixing various kinds of cereals and
milk.46 The second is much older and convoluted: to learn how the use and
abuse of patents affected the improvement of that classical transportation
tool called the bicycle.47

Notes
    1. Intellectual monopolists are quite aware that their interest requires selling restricted
products that are less useful for consumers, which is why they perceive the "darknet" -
on which you and I can trade the things we purchase - as a major threat. Biddle
et al. (n.d.) clearly, if unwillingly, documents this.
    2. Detailed data on patents applications, approvals, country of origin, and so on and
so forth are available online, for the period 1963-2005, at the site of the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office, at http://www.uspto.gov.
    3. That in the 1990s the number of intellectual property lawyers grew even more than
the number of patents is a very bad sign for all of us, we learned from an address
by Richard Posner to the American Enterprise Institute, November 19, 2002. We
read it at http://www.techlawjournal.com/intelpro/20021119.asp (accessed February
4, 2005).
    4. Quoted in Bessen (2003), p. 1. Jerry Baker's statement was made at the U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office (1994) hearings.
    5. We inferred the "halfway competent" assessment about lawyers from the official
approval rates for patent applications, which is at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/
ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.pdf (accessed February 24, 2008). Since the early 1960s,
roughly 50 percent of applications are granted. Percentages are even higher for particular kinds of applications, such as those for designs and plants (see http://www.
thestandard.com/article/0, 1902,20543,00.html accessed February 24. 2008).
    6. Much of the discussion of patents in the software industry is drawn from Bessen
(2003) and Bessen and Hunt (2003), who give detailed references to the original
judicial, legal, and factual sources.
    7. The Economist (2005).
    8. Ibid.
    9. Ibid. In the same issue of that celebrated magazine we can find the story of QualComm, the prototypical "IP company," the paean of which is sung so beautifully and
in such revealing terms that we cannot help quoting, extensively, from pp. 8-9 of the
previously mentioned special survey:
    Qualcomm created a technology called CDMA, which now forms the basis of thirdgeneration wireless networks. Around one third of the company's revenues (and
60% of its profits) come from royalties on all equipment that uses the technology;
the remainder comes from selling the chips that rely on that intellectual property,