250.40 The Climate of Invention

250.401 In the competitive world of money-making, discoveries are looked upon as exploitable and monopolizable claims to be operated as private properties of big business. As a consequence, the world has come to think of both discoveries and patents as monopolized property. This popular viewpoint developed during the last century, when both corporations and government supported by courts have required individuals working for them to assign to them the patent rights on any discoveries or inventions made while in their employ. Employees were to assign these rights during, and for two years after termination of, their employment, whether or not the invention had been developed at home or at work. The drafting of expert patent claims is an ever more specialized and complex art, involving expensive legal services usually beyond the reach of private individuals. When nations were remote from one another, internal country patents were effective protection. With today’s omniproximities of the world’s countries, only world-around patents costing hundreds of thousands of dollars are now effective, with the result that patent properties are available only to rich corporations.

250.41 So now the major portions of extant inventions belong to corporations and governments. However, invention and discovery are inherently individual functions of the minds of individual humans. Corporations are legal fabrications; they cannot invent and discover. Patent s were originally conceived of a s grants to inventors to help them recover the expenses of the long development of their discoveries; and they gave the invent or only a very short time to recover the expense. Because I am concerned with finding new technical ways of do ing more with less, by which increasing numbers of humanity can emerge from abject poverty into states of physical advantage i n respect to their environment, I have taken out many patent claimsfirst, to hold the credit of initiative for the inspiration received by humanity’s needs and the theory of their best solution being that of the design revolution and not political revolution, and second, to try to recover the expense of development. But most importantly, I have taken the patents to avoid being stopped by othersin particular, corporations and governments from doing what I felt needed doing.