More Freedom

Quiet, fast-moving Leo Crowley, U.S. Alien Property Custodian, wrote a letter to his Commander in Chief last week to tell him that by year's end he will have seized over 50,000 patents. That is virtually every U.S. patent held by citizens of enemy and enemy-occupied nations.

For the U.S. at war, Leo Crowley pointed out, his patent grabs mean that "some of the finest research achievements of modern science" will be available to any interested U.S. manufacturer. His plums include: Krupp patents on heavy machinery, diesel engines, locomotives and metal alloys; I. G. Farbenindustrie's work on oil and coal products, aluminum and magnesium fabricating, etc.; Focke-Wulf and Dornier aircraft improvements. But for the long pull, the significant part of Leo Crowley's letter to the President was the outline he made of his patent policy. It was a patent reformer's dream:

> Although patent owners from enemy-occupied countries will be allowed to resume their ownership (and right to "reasonable royalties") after the war, all seized patents not already licensed exclusively will be licensed royalty-free to all comers, after payment of an initial $50 fee.

> American rights under exclusive licenses will be respected "pending further study," but "restrictive provisions governing production, use, price and market area in any license" will be thrown out. As an inducement to exclusive licensees not to retain their monopoly (for which they usually have to pay stiff royalties) Crowley suggested that they might prefer nonexclusive licenses immediately, royalty-free.

> In order to encourage wide use of all these inventions, Crowley will: 1) distribute full information on them to "small I business as well as large"; 2) undertake to defend new licensees against infringement suits by former owners.

To Custodian Crowley, this patent policy was no dreamy reform, but strictly a wartime measure. He did not presume to answer the central question around which all the wrangles over U.S. patent reform have revolved: how to encourage invention and competition at the same time (TIME, April 27). But it may well turn out that, with one stroke, Businessman Crowley (who is still the $50,000-a-year boss of Standard Gas & Electric) accomplished far more patent reform than Professor-Trustbuster Thurman Arnold with all his fulminations about how the U.S. patent system encouraged the Nazis to "strangle" the U.S. war effort. Practical experience with taking the monopoly out of foreign patents during the war should give the U.S. some valuable lessons in how to limit domestic patent monopolies later.

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