Around MIT, Jerome Lemelson is a hallowed name. The late inventor’s 500- plus patents (more than any other individual save Thomas Edison) earned him enough to endow the Institute’s $500,000 Lemelson Prize for technological innovation. But to Seth Shulman, a journalist who is a frequent contributor to TR and a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, Lemelson’s success epitomizes a growing scandal in the United States: the privatization of the “conceptual commons. ”
Shulman writes that Lemelson was often the first to file for a patent on ideas circulating in the intellectual air, such as combining videotape and the TV camera in the hand-held camcorder. Even if he never built a working model or his patent was issued belatedly, the priority of his claim allowed him to hold whole industries hostage, Shulman argues. “Lemelson’s technique -one he repeated throughout his career -was to demand royalties from the companies with existing products that could be construed as infringing his broad claims.”
“Charging rent on dreams,” Shulman calls it, and Lemelson is hardly the only one criticized for this practice in his book. Physicians patenting surgical procedures, seed companies suing farmers for selling part of a genetically engineered crop to neighbors for seed, and pharmaceutical firms purveying drugs derived from tropical plants without paying a cent to the indigenous tribes who first noticed their curative powers all come under Shulman’s lens. His book amounts to an eloquent warning against what he describes as “an uncontrolled stampede to auction off our technological and cultural heritage.”
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