Unless President Lincoln sued over his patent,
he can not be
called a Patent Troll. I hope
the rest of your comment is more
accurate.
You caught me with my pants on fire. I am indeed a
liar. I truly don't
always say, "Keep Cool with Coolidge." Sometimes I
say other things.
The fact is, I hardly ever
even think of Coolidge,
and sometimes many months have gone by
between my
separate utterances of "Keep
Cool with Coolidge." :-)
That said, you will at least have to give me
credit for having said "a patent
troll or a non-practicing entity." A
non-practicing entity is related to
a patent troll. See the Wikipedia article
entitled "Patent Troll."
I'll have to say that we (or at least, I) don't
know exactly what Abraham
Lincoln intended by filing a patent on a device he
did not (and probably could
not) have manufactured himself. But it is a
fact that Lincoln was a
strong supporter of the patent system. He said, in
1859, "The patent system
added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius."
See "The Law of Patents," Craig
Allen Nard, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, and Abraham
Lincoln
Online, "Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions," which cites as its source,
"Collected Works of Abraham
Lincoln," The Abraham Lincoln Association, edited by Roy P. Basler.
We
also know that Abraham Lincoln, in addition to applying for patents
on behalf
of himself and for others, represented litigants in patent cases. For
example,
he represented the defendant in Parker v. Hoyt, a patent case in
1850 involving
a waterwheel. Lincoln won the case for the defendant. He also
encouraged
people to patent inventions. (Search the Collected Works, above.
Note that
land patents are completely different and all references to
such should
be ignored for purposes of this discussion.)
So it is not outside of the
realm of possibility that Lincoln would himself
have
been a non-practicing
entity seeking a licensee or that he would have
encouraged non-practicing
entities, which, under the
definition found for NPEs under the Wikipedia entry
"Patent Troll" referred to
above, is "a patent owner who does not manufacture
or use the patented
invention, but rather than abandoning the right to exclude,
an NPE seeks to
enforce its right through the negotiation of licenses and
litigation"
If you can find otherwise, I would appreciate being corrected.
My own
intuition is that you will not find nothing from him supporting your
side of the
argument, if only because Lincoln was too busy being a general
practice
lawyer for others and later, too preoccupied as President with some
petty
quarrel to worry much about licensing his own patented invention.
Furthermore, any licensing negotiation may well have been kept private and
separate from his public papers, which would certainly have been within his
right to do. But the circumstances seem to support as reasonable a conclusion
that he very well may have tried to do so.
I don't recall whether I linked
to it in my previous post, or if I did, whether
it actually came through as an
active link. But if you want to actually
see Abraham Lincoln's patent,
do a search for Abraham Lincoln here. It will be the first
patent at
the top of the list. It's still being cited as prior art to other patents,
including one that issued earlier this year. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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