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Show THE AMERICAN WAY I pS HALF A TRUTH tyjtfth A BLACKEST OF LIES t By Genrse PeckMil "That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought outright, out-right, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight." Tennyson Almost a century before Alfred Al-fred Tennyson penned this immortal im-mortal truth, the Founding Fathers Fath-ers wrote into the American Constitution Con-stitution what powers the Congress Con-gress should have. Power Number Num-ber 8, Section 8, of Article 1 thereof, reads as follows: "The Congress shall have power to promote pro-mote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited limit-ed limes to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective re-spective writings and discoveries." discover-ies." Every American should read that sentence carefully the entire en-tire sentence because there are abroad in the land certain gentlemen gentle-men who quite glibly quote it that is, a part of it but who unscrupulously un-scrupulously put a period where the Founding Fathers did not place one. Shakespeare must have had their prototypes of his day in mind when he wrote: "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." These gentlemen in their zeal to destroy the American patent system tell "a lie which is half a truth" which "is the blackest of i lies." At their basic reason for aborting the patent laws by denying deny-ing an inventor his 17-year exclusive ex-clusive right to make, use or sell his invention, by forcing him to "share his invention" by "compelling "com-pelling him to license" same to whomsoever some government bureau may dictate, they quote the Constitution as intending to provide that the patent, once issued, is-sued, must be used in such a man ner as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts," presumably pre-sumably according to the whim of some bureaucrat. And there they stop, deliberately deliberat-ely resorting to the chinanery of omitting the rest of the sentence which reads, "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors in-ventors the exclusive rights to their respective writing and discoveries." dis-coveries." It is the exclusiveness of the patent right that our. Constitution offers as an inducement in-ducement to inventors to "promote "pro-mote the progress of science and useful arts" by inventing for our people things which did not before be-fore exist. No more outstanding example could be found to illustrate just what Lord Tennyson meant when he wrote: "But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight." Fortunately, in this particular case, there is available to all who can and will read, the exact and complete text of the Constitution. The drafters of that Constitution deemed protection of inventors of paramount importance. In words not subjects to honest misinterpretation, mis-interpretation, they proclained "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive exclus-ive right to their respective writings writ-ings and discoveries." The history of the United States bears eloquent testimony to the wisdom and foresight of the Founding Fathers in assuring exclusive rights to inventors. Because Be-cause of this protection we became be-came the most inventive nation in the world and because we became be-came the most inventive nation, we developed the highest standard stand-ard of living ever achieved by any nation in all the world's his-torv. his-torv. Shall we now Interrupt this progress by permitting certain malicious misquoters, or rather half-nuoters. to bamboozle us into in-to believing that our Constitution suggests that the progress of science will be promoted by denving to an inventor his exclusive ex-clusive right to his discovery? The answer to that question should be a thundering ,'NO" from every American who has the future wplfarp of his country at heart a "NO" that, should reverberate re-verberate in the halls of Congress, Con-gress, so that our Congressmen may know beyond any shadow of doubt that wp havp not fallen for "half a trntV' which "is ever the blackest of lies." |