A patent is a government-granted monopoly. Everyone is head over heels in love with the idea of patenting something. It appears quintessentially American, that if you invent something you should have sole rights to making money off it. To paraphrase President Abraham Lincoln’s own take on it, the patent system adds the fuel of self-interest to the fire of genius.

Fine. But it ‘s still a monopoly, and monopolies arenot about genius and innovation. Monopolies are about maximizing the extraction of wealth and dominating the marketplace to expand economic power. Monopolies even have the unfortunate but all too natural historic effect of becoming political brokers and power centres in their own right, further stifling competition and innovation.

This is something that the devotees of the traditional free enterprise system, as typically accepted by most, fail to take into account. Patent laws, whatever their plans, have come to serve monopolistic interests, stifling innovation. Patent laws constitute a veritable underbrush of hurdles that force newbies to spend plenty of their precious startup capital on barristers and legal research. What patent laws actually do, in practice, is guarantee profits for the already-rich and rich. That somebody not wealthy may benefit from these laws is entirely incidental to the incontrovertible fact that these laws by and large serve established interests.

How does society benefit?

Not by much, in fact. Indeed, the proverbial tiny inventors are exactly those most hurt by current patent laws. The central and in a number of ways only excuse for a patent system goes out the window when we glance at the real consequences of these laws. For piracy and intellectual property theft is as rampant as ever, notwithstanding even the purported billions that various industries claim to spend on combating such crimes. So crime isn’t stopped or maybe deterred. But it is the tiny businessperson or woman with a Better Mousetrap who is restrained.

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