Let's review and rejig intellectual property protection

Scienceand technology have advanced most reliably when carried out in the open.

- RAHUL MATTHAN

Isaac Newton was only able to publish Principia Mathematica because he was able to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” such as Galileo and Kepler, who had made their own work public. But the very same Isaac Newton also dabbled in alchemy, a field in which practitioners were notoriously secretive about their experiments in transmuting base metal into gold. Given that he had no ‘shoulders to stand on,’ Newton was far less successful as an alchemist than as a scientist.

Innovators need an incentive to continue inventing. While science has traditionally flourished because of patronage, technology typically tends to succeed when it is profitable. This is why we developed intellectual property law, an artificial monopoly designed to ensure that innovators have an incentive to invent. In exchange for disclosing their inventions to the public, inventors are granted patent protection that effectively gives them a temporary monopoly over the exploitation of their inventions, letting them monetize them exclusively for that period. However, from the very early days of patent protection, it was clear that such a monopoly could quickly lead to complacency, extinguishing the very inventive spark it was supposed to nourish.