The law of patents for inventions Author:Willard Phillips Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: interest more especially, it may be dispensed with by an act of special legislation, a right to which is reserved by the government, to be used, when, from fear ... more »of benefiting a public enemy or a foreign competitor in the market, the advantages are supposed to be on the side of secrecy ;10 though this latter ground is now mostly abandoned, and the former is, at the most, but occasional and temporary. CHAPTER III. Different Kinds of Encouragement to the Arts. The inventor, then, having a just claim to remuneration and reward, we come next to the question what kinds of remuneration and reward are practicable and suitable. And in this respect the community is not necessarily restricted to the granting to the inventor a preference in the enjoyment of the advantages of the use of his invention. Rewards in money have in many instances been promised before hand, or awarded subsequently, for discoveries. The divine honors, paid by the Greeks and other ancientnations to those who were public benefactors by their useful discoveries, originated in the principle upon which modern patent laws are founded, though the kind of reward bestowed in the two cases is different. In some instances the inventor cannot be rewarded directly out of the fruits of his invention. This is the case with many discoveries in science. Were any philosopher to discover a certain and easy method of squaring the circle, he could not be rewarded by a grant of a monopoly of the advantage, if it consisted in mere calculation. The British government offered a reward for an improvement in the mode of ascertaining the longitude. Public grants have been made to Mr. Babbage in consideration of the utility of his calculating machine. Many other instances might be enumerated in which a monopoly of the invention was not c...« less