What I am suggesting is that we are suffering from heavy costs on account of a Department which has been set up and which is going to cost £17,000 to produce nothing of value. The patent which you get is not worth the paper it is written on. A patent is a contract between a State and an individual in which, in consideration of that individual divulging for use knowledge which he has of a new manufacture, the State gives him the monopoly of the use of that for a certain period of years. Now, the validity and value and use of that patent depends altogether on the amount of care which is taken by the State in seeing that that thing is in itself new. The British patent agent's inquiry into the British records gives you something which is practically of negligible value. In any developing industry the examination to-day will not include the things which are going through, and when you get your patent it is not worth it.
I have here a series of patents which illustrate very accurately the value of the commercial property which is being given to the community at this high price. Take the case, first, of your patent agent's examination. All that includes is the statement that in a particular patent office there is not a record for fifty years. Anything which was invented fifty-two years ago you can get a patent for, and it is of no value when you have got it. Assume you take the other line, and go through and get a British patent, and you bring it back here and register it and pay your fees in relation to it, what is it worth? Unless it is backed by the patent of some other country, which does make a proper examination, it is not worth the paper it is written on. I have here a patent which was taken out in England through one of the most prominent and most accomplished patent agents there. It has eleven separate claims, two of which are generic, which would make it a master patent. It went through without any difficulty, and is capable of being registered in the Irish Free State. It went to America, and the report of the American Patent Office was that there was not one single claim in it, generic or otherwise, which they would pass. I have here another British patent which, after it had been passed and registered, they discovered was bad. I will take another case of a British patent that I know went through. It had four claims, and it was a very fine patent indeed. The man started manufacturing the goods under it, brought them to England, and a man showed him on his shelves in England actual things for sale, made in America under an American patent, which completely voided and made useless his own.
My objection to spending this £17,000 or so is that we are putting a whole lot of people to a lot of quite unnecessary expense merely to get a patent by reference to, probably, one of the patents in the world. In France they will accept for registration practically anything you give them. They give you a brevet; they mark it "Not guaranteed by the Government." You know what you are getting. In the Free State you are getting a patent which ought to be marked "Not guaranteed by anybody," and in itself of no use to anybody unless it is guaranteed by an American patent. If we had taken the line of saying "Let us have a search through the American Patent Office," then we would probably get something of value. If we had taken the line of saying "Simply let us register this patent. as they do in France and other countries, and then let the man fight for his patent on the value of what is actually contained in the document." we would have done something reasonable and logical. We have done neither one nor the other. We have pretended to set up a patent which simply is not worth anything. That is why I say you have to take into account in this matter the history of this office and find out whether they really did mean to give us any property in our patent, or whether this is purely a revenue department; whether we are simply trying to collect money, and if we are, we could collect it much more cheaply than by setting up a Department which will cost £17,000.
When our courts did declare that we had industrial property in all existing patents in this State, we introduced deliberately an Act to upset in advance any further decision of the courts which would uphold that decision. When I came to look up that Act, typical of quite a whole lot of rubbish which has been poured through this House, as through a funnel, in the name of laws, I find that this actual law which was introduced to upset that did not exist. It had never been reduced even to written form. It simply consisted of its short title. I have been through the thing, looking for it. I may be wrong. I tried to find it in the House, but I am informed that it was purely and simply a bogey man, put up to tell the courts which said we had industrial property in this country that we were not going to have the black flag of piracy raised by the courts or anybody else. That is the meaning of it; that is the mentality.
