The last time the Supreme Court heard a case on what kinds of innovations deserved patents was in 1981 — the year IBM launched the first personal computer using a disk operating system from a young Microsoft. The Internet as we know it was still years in the future.
This month, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider what can be patented. At stake are tens of thousands of existing patents and a rethinking of why we have patent protections in the first place.
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.”
