Patents keep inventors from collaborating
We may say the same about inventors, that we have said of scientists: the greatest science is always self-financed. Who does not know what sufferings nearly all great inventions have cost? Sleepless nights, families deprived of food, want of tools and materials for experiments, etc.
But what should we do to alter conditions that everybody is convinced are bad? Patents have been tried, and we know with what results. The inventor sells their patent, and the one who has only lent the capital pockets the enormous profits often resulting from the invention. Besides, patents isolate the inventor. They compel them to keep their reaserch secret which may end in failure; whereas the simplest suggestion coming from someone less absorbed in the fundamental idea can sometimes serve to enhance the invention and make it practical. Like all state control, patents hamper the progress of industry. Thought being incapable of being patented, patents are a crying injustice in theory, and in practice they result in one of the great obstacles to the rapid development of invention.
References
- Kropotkin, Peter. (1892). The Conquest of Bread Chapter 9. The need for luxury (p. 158).