Geoffrey recently warned of the perils of centralized innovation. In contradistinction to that very warning, I came across this footnote (chapter 14, footnote 3) in Friedrich A. Hayek’s famous ‘The Road to Serfdom‘:
The case of the alleged suppression of useful patents is more complicated and cannot be adequately discussed in a note; but the conditions in which it would be profitable to put into cold storage a patent which in the social interest ought to be used are so exceptional that it is more than doubtful whether this has happened in any important instance. [emphasis in original]
In Hayek’s favor, there was no internet or WikiLeaks back then (but then again, perhaps that was AT&T’s fault!)