or An Essay on the Right of Authors and Inventors to a Perpetual Property in their IdeasSECTION VII. Objection Seventh. It is said that two men sometimes make the same invention; and that it would therefore be wrong to give the whole invention to one. The answer to this objection is, that the fact that two men produce the same invention, is a very good reason why the invention should belong to both; but it is no reason at all why both should be deprived of it. If two men produce the same invention, each has an equal right to it; because each has an equal right to the fruits of his labor. Neither can deny the right of the other, without denying also his own. The consequence is, that they must either use and sell the invention in competition with each other, or unite their rights, and share the invention between them. These are the only alternatives, which their relations to each other admit of. And it is for the parties themselves, and not for the government, to determine which of these al...
The most complicated pieces of mechanism are often not the latest but the earliest results of the inventor's skill in a particular direction. Improvements in machinery very frequently take the form of a reduction in the number of wheels and principles of motion, necessary to obtain the desired result, and a machine is considered to be more nearly perfect in proportion as its action becomes more direct. It is safe to conclude, too, that this law of human progression from the complicated to the direct, is by no means confined to mechanics. In philosophy and in sociology similar phenomena may be observed. Thus the Social Democratic scheme for reorganizing society--based as it is upon an insufficient knowledge of the principles which govern the... (From : AnarchyArchives.)