THIS YEAR marks the 150th anniversary of William Perkin’s discovery of artificial dyes. Before Perkin, dyes for clothes and textiles were extracted from plants and animals (the Roman imperial purple came from a marine snail — 120,000 snails per toga). These dyes were expensive and they faded fast.

In 1856 Perkin, who was then only 18 years old and who experimented in the attic at home in London, discovered that a chemical called aniline, which was extracted from coal tar, could be converted into an intense purple dye he named mauve.

He patented it and, with his father, set up in business to develop it. Yet bankruptcy loomed because he could find no investors. Fortunately, continental chemists ignored his patents, and they marketed their own mauve, and when the Empress Eugénie discovered that it matched the colour of her eyes, all Paris went mad for it.

When Queen Victoria announced that she, too, wanted to wear mauve, British investors flocked to invest in Perkin’s company — whose burgeoning research thus spawned the modern chemicals industry.

Patents are a menace. Industrialists lobby for them, but only because industrialists love monopolies. Adam Smith wrote that “men of the same trade seldom meet together, even for the purposes of amusement, but the conversation turns into a conspiracy against the public” and patents are such a conspiracy.

Inventors claim that they need patents to incentivise their research, but the opposite is true. In this world of accelerating technology, it is the company that fails to innovate that goes bust. Companies take out patents, therefore, to monopolise a product so that, having neutralised the competition, they need do no more research. Only when the competitors catch up are companies forced back into research.

Equally, industrialists claim that patents benefit society because they disclose proprietary knowledge — but would industrialists really collude with a patent system that forced them to publish useful information?

Proprietary knowledge is a myth because, as Eric von Hippel, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has demonstrated, technology companies routinely exchange information — even important information — with rivals. That is because the companies that share knowledge outperform the non-collaborators. This explains, incidentally, why research companies cluster in science parks, the better to collaborate. It also explains why industrialists publish patents — the material is already public.

Although scientific collaboration outrages anti-trust legislators, it approximates to economic perfection because, ideally, all companies should share all their science, and they should compete solely over the delivery of new products. But patents frustrate such economic perfection.

When governments really want to foster society’s interests, they overrule patents. The Wright brothers, for example, patented the airplane in 1904, and they consequently blocked any further development of aircraft in America. But European aviation flourished. So in 1917, on declaring war, Washington suspended all aviation patents in America — a suspension that was lifted only in 1975 by the Justice Department, which believed in anti-trust laws.

But anti-trust legislators do not understand that ideas are different from things. We need rights over things because things can be used by only one person at a time. Their ownership, therefore, needs to be clear if we are to avoid conflict. But ideas can be used by billions, and their dissemination is a public good.

Nonetheless, the market naturally protects innovators. Copying new technology is difficult, even for specialists, and imitators lag behind by years — the years of legitimate monopoly for innovators. In only one industry are patents justifiable, the pharmaceutical industry. There, it takes so long to meet safety regulations that innovators do need artificial protection from imitators. But, elsewhere, imitation stimulates wholly beneficial competitive research.

Karl Marx wrote that capitalists seek not to open markets but to close them, and governments are naive enough to collude with them. Perkin was lucky in not being able to enforce his patents; would that his luck now extended universally.

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