Mastodawn

When I was a baby patent agent, I was taught that US patent law had a "moral utility" requirement. That is, the US Patent and Trademark Office would not grant a patent on any invention having no moral utility.

The cited example was Rickard v. Du Bon (103 F. 868, 2d Cir. 1900): A patent on a method of putting spots on tobacco leaves was held invalid, because the only purpose of doing so was to make lower-quality tobacco *appear* to be higher quality, although it did not improve the tobacco in any way.

Since the leaf-spotting method had no utility that wasn't immoral, the patent was invalidated. (cont)

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PAgent 🇺🇦

Even earlier, however, in his opinion for Lowell v. Lewis (15 F. Cas. 1018, 1019, C.C.D. Mass. 1817) Justice Story stated that "All that the law requires is, that the invention should not be frivolous or injurious to the well-being, good policy, or sound morals of society. The word ‘useful,’ therefore, is incorporated into the [patent] act in contradistinction to mischievous or immoral. For instance, a new invention to poison people, or to promote debauchery, or to facilitate private assassination, is not a patentable invention.” (cont)

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PAgent 🇺🇦4d ago

I was therefore quite surprised to find a US patent for a gas chamber, a sealed room for conducting executions by poison gas (US 2,802,462 to Williams, Aug 13, 1957).

Well. This necessarily implies that a gas chamber for killing prisoners must have a moral utility. So, either the execution of prisoners by the state using a gas chamber is, in itself, a moral utility, or there is some OTHER use for the gas chamber that WOULD BE considered a moral utility.

Weird.

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Fredrik Egrelius 4d ago

@PAgent Thank you for good examples. The patent you found is indeed an extreme example and I could only speculate that it was granted based on that that it might have been lawful to execute people like this. A less extreme tech which is patented today is lawful interception, ie wiretapping /evesdropping, which would be said to be against morality unless a court order had approved it,