These Supreme Court quotations demonstrate the principle that
the US patent system exists to modify the behavior of
certain individuals for the sake of the public good, and not for
the sake of patent holders.


In Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966), still the leading Supreme
Court ruling on applying the obviousness standard, the Court through
Justice Tom Clark (father of Ramsey Clark, by the way), said:

    "....the federal patent power stems from a specific
constitutional provision...(which)...is both a grant of power and a
limitation....limited to promotion of advances in "the useful
arts.".....The Congress in the exercise of patent power may not
overreach the restraints imposed by the stated constitutional
purpose.  Nor may it enlarge the patent monopoly without regard to the
innovation, advancement, or social benefit gained thereby."-383 U.S.at 5-6

    The Supreme Court went on to discuss the views of Thomas
Jefferson who was the first administrator of the U.S. patent system
and himself a noted inventor of improvements in plows and other
things.  Clark quoted (at 383 U.S. 8, n.2) an Aug. 1813 letter of
Jefferson to Isaac McPherson:

     "Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late
in  progress of society.  It would be curious then, if an idea, 
fungible fermentation of an individual brain could, of natural right,
 be claimed in exclusive and stable property.  If nature has made any
one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it
is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an
individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself;
but the nmoment it is divulged, it forces itself into possession of
every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.  Its
peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because
every other possesses the whole of it.  He who receives an idea from
me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he lights
his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.  That ideas
should spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and
mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to
have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature when she
made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening
their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe,
move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or
exclusive appropriation.  Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a
subject of property.  Society may give an exclusive right to the
profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas
which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according
to the will of society, without claim or complaint from anybody." VI
Writings of Thomas Jefferson at 180-181 (Washington edition).

    In Breener v. Manson, 383 U.S. 519 (1966), the Supreme Court
denied patentability for a process of making a steroid which had no
then known use and speaking through Justice Fortas, said:

     "Whatever weight is attached to the value of encouraging
disclosure and inhibiting secrecy, we believe that a more compelling
consideration is that a process patent in the chemical field, which
has not been developed and pointed to the degree of specific utility,
creates a monopoly of knowledge which should be granted only if
clearly commanded by the statute.  Until... reduced to production of a
product shown to be useful, the metes and bounds of that monopoly are
not capable of precise delineation.  It may engross a vast unknown,
and perhaps unknowable area.  Such a patent may confer power to block
off whole areas of scientific development (footnote), without
compensating benefit to the public...."-- 383 U.S. at 534.