Protecting or stifling a good idea?

Patents on fishing gears are a thorny issue. There must be thousands of patents out there, many of them long lapsed and the vast majority of them now entirely irrelevant as fishing practices have evolved, leaving what were once smart ideas far behind.

Few went beyond being more than interesting paper exercises, such as the 19th century idea of sewing cow hides inside a trawl, circling mouth as an early concept of a kite. In fact, some of the early ideas for progressive fishing gears were highly imaginative, magnificently impractical and worthy of an hour or two looking at some of the crazier suggestions.

Some things we take for granted were actually patented; such as Süberkrüb’s original high-aspect trawl doors that weren’t much good for bottom trawling at the time, but which came into their element years later when single-boat pelagic trawling took off. The original Atom trawl, the first workable pelagic trawl back in the 1940s, was subject to a patent, but the tale goes that it was described too precisely in the documentation, allowing others only to change some cutting rates to escape infringing the patent.

Many key inventions were simply developed by trial and error on the decks of sidewinders, spread by word of mouth, which in turn sparked further development as others added their own spin, either by themselves or by getting a blacksmith or a netmaker ashore to knock up what they had in mind.

Different world
Today we live in a very different world. Instant communications have made the planet much smaller than it once was and an idea can find its way from the Arctic to the Antipodes in minutes instead of months. It’s also a high-tech world, and fishing is no exception. Not only is development more complex than when hardware was iron and net was braided by hand, it’s also way more expensive. Sophisticated electronics and high-tech materials are produced under patent following sometimes years of development work.

You can see why developers make every effort to protect investments in new gear and are reluctant to allow someone else to reap the rewards of their hard work. But how far should this go? There are examples of patents on gear rigs that are hardly likely to be reproduced often enough for the holder to recoup the legal fees that went into the original patent paperwork, so you have to wonder why some of these things were patented to begin with.

Today a smart idea can’t surface until the lawyers have been consulted and anything new that breaks the surface is immediately examined for any potential infringement. Ringfencing ownership of an idea is accepted business practice and entirely understandable – but the downside of that is a good idea no longer gets the same scrutiny as others seek to take things a step further. There’s no denying it’s sound business practice, and wonderful for the legal profession, but it can also halt dead in its tracks development of a good idea that could be even better. It makes you wonder how pelagic trawling would have developed if Robert Larsen hadn’t described his Atom trawl quite so precisely all those years ago.