Well! how will you judge the counterfeit, if you have no
guarantee? In vain will they offer you the plea: in right first
occupancy, in fact similarity. Where reality depends upon
quality, not to demand a guarantee is to grant no right over
anything, is to take away the means of comparing processes and
identifying the counterfeit. In the matter of industrial
processes success depends upon such trifles! Now, these trifles
are the whole.
I infer from all this that the law regarding patents for
inventions, indispensable so far as its motives are concerned, is
impossible--that is, illogical, arbitrary, disastrous--in its
economy. Under the control of certain necessities the legislator
has thought best, in the general interest, to grant a privilege
for a definite thing; and he finds that he has given a
signature-in-blank to monopoly, that he has abandoned the chances
which the public had of making the discovery or some other
similar to it, that he has sacrificed the rights of competitors
without compensation, and abandoned the good faith of defenceless
consumers to the greed of quacks.
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