MP John Lewis Ricardo Saw Patents as Monopolistic Obstacles to Laissez-Faire and Denied Outright that Patents Accelerated Invention; Patents Were Equivalent to the Corn Laws

As remarkable as the creation of a real patent system, however, was the simultaneous advent of real and sustained calls for patents to be abolished altogether. Among the first of those prepared to voice this possibility was the MP John Lewis Ricardo, nephew of David Ricardo, the great political economist, and himself a convinced opponent of the Corn Laws. The younger Ricardo was the chairman of one of the early telegraph companies—telegraphy being by far the most advanced and exciting commercial science of the day. He had found himself forced to buy up patents to forestall litigation, and was therefore inclined by his own experience to see them as monopolistic obstacles to laissez-faire. He pointed out—as many would repeat in the next generation—that patents had not been required to stimulate the invention of printing, gunpowder, or paper. Only “trivial” improvements tended to be patented, he claimed. In the end, Ricardo denied outright that patents accelerated invention. He maintained instead that they were an unnecessary impediment—the equivalent, in effect, to the navigation acts or the Corn Laws themselves.

--Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 262.