Excerpt from Debates Before Parliament: Relative to the Enactment of a Compulsory Working Clause Into the British Patent Statutes

The president of the Board of Trade (Mr. Lloyd-George, Carnarvon Boroughs), in asking leave to bring in a bill to amend the law relating to patents an designs, said: "This bill introduces a good many improvements which have been found necessary in the working of the patent laws in this country. The main object is to simplify and cheapen procedure. The bill will make provision for the grant of patents of addition, there will be additional checks against invalid patents, and a cheaper procedure for the revocation of patents. These will be introduced in the interest of the poor inventor, for, although it often suits a rich and powerful company to have complicated and expensive machinery, it very often involves ruin for a poor inventor. I propose, therefore, to introduce a series of conditions which, I hope, will effect a considerable cheapening of procedure. I do not know that we can ever make the patent laws cheap as long as the fees of counsel and experts are high, but something can be done in order to meet the difficulty. I also propose to introduce later on a consolidation bill, and if that bill goes through the grand committee on trade I think it will be possible to amalgamate it with the present bill. But the main object of this bill, after all, is to prevent the patent laws from being used for the hindrance and suppression of British industrial development. The object of the patent laws is to reward ingenuity, and by so doing to encourage invention and to promote British industry. Unfortunately, however, they have been used in many respects to discourage the British inventor and to destroy many British industries. What is happening at the present moment? Out of 14, 700 patents issued last year, 6, 500 are foreign. I do not object to that, but a good many of these patents have been taken out not for the purpose of working the patents in this country but for the purpose of preventing their being worked. That I consider to be an abuse of a privilege conceded by British laws. There is a still worse abuse, on the whole I think it is the worst. The British inventor who takes out a patent is very often a poor man who has been able to get his patent financed up to a certain point. After he has started and set up works and purchased machinery there comes a powerful foreign syndicate which has found there is something in his patent which they imagine is covered by an invention they have already patented - for these patents are very often in exceedingly vague terms. This syndicate then brings to bear the whole machinery of their powerful organization to crush the inventor.

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