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Some Of The Lost X-Patents Found
Jerry Browne writes "
The New York Times (reg req) is carrying
a story
about the recent discovery of some lost patents. Apparantly a fire at a
temporay storage site in July 1836 destroyed the first 10000 patents issued. From the article..."The
Patent and Trademark Office has issued nearly seven million patents; the
first 10,000 are known as the X-patents. They were issued from July 1790,
when the United States patent system was created under an order signed
by George Washington, to July 1836, when every one of them burned in a
fire...In the 168 years since the fire, only about 2,800 have been recovered....Until
this spring, that is, when two lawyers...a clue to several important patents
from the 1790's - including one from 1826 for the first internal combustion
engine...""
Historical value? Just because you can't find any use for them doesn't mean they're not valuable to some random historian researching early industry or something...
I hope this helps to usher in the return of the working model requirement. As patents used to require a working model in order to be awarded, it surely would've been easier to figure out whose patent was which when the inventor actually had to have a working one! So long to all those hi-tech patents where the company merely drafted a requirements document and fired it off to the USPTO. Let's see you build one first! 10-20 million lines of code later, the hi-tech patent volume slides down a few more notches.
stuff |
Methinks you forget the entire *point* of a patent system.
The patent system exists so that inventors have an incentive to disclose their inventions to the public. This is so that others can use the invention once the patent expires, and the idea doesn't just sit in some forgotten vault.
The value of a patent to the country as a whole lies not in the time that the patent is valid, but after it expires, when it is freely availible to all for use.