The absence of business method patents cannot be explained by
an absence of entrepreneurial creativity in Great Britain during the century
before the American Revolution. On the contrary, 1720 is widely hailed as
the beginning of a new era in English public finance and the beginning of
major innovations in business organization.
Malla Pollack, The Multiple Unconstitutionality of Business Method Patents, 28 Rutgers
Computer & Tech. L.J. 61, 96 (2002) (footnotes omitted).
In the hundreds of patents
in Woodcroft’s exhaustive list of English patents granted from 1612 to 1793, there
appears to be only a single patent akin to the type of method Bilski seeks to claim. That
sole exception was a patent granted to John Knox in 1778 on a “Plan for assurances on
lives of persons from 10 to 80 years of age.”
Later commentators have viewed this
single patent as clearly contrary to the Statute of Monopolies:
Such protection of an idea should be impossible . . . . It is difficult to
understand how Knox’s plan for insuring lives could be regarded as ‘a new
manner of manufacture’; perhaps the Law Officer was in a very good
humour that day, or perhaps he had forgotten the wording of the statute;
most likely he was concerned only with the promised ‘very considerable
Consumption of [Revenue] Stamps’ which, Knox declared, would
‘contribute to the increase of the Public Revenues.’
Renn, supra n.16 at 285. There is no indication that Knox’s patent was ever enforced or
its validity tested, or that this example led to other patents or efforts to patent similar
activities. But the existence of the Knox patent suggests that as of 1793 the potential
advantage of patenting such activities was well-understood.
In short, the need to accommodate technological change in no way suggests that
16
Similarly, another commentator states: “it might be wondered why none of the
many ingenious schemes of insurance has ever been protected by patenting it.” D.F.
Renn, John Knox’s Plan for Insuring Lives: A Patent of Invention in 1778, 101 J. Inst.
Actuaries 285 (1974), available at http://www.actuaries.org.uk/__data/assets/
pdf_file/0006/25278/0285-0289.pdf (last visited Oct. 3, 2008).
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