On Big bang theory the big theme for the season seems to be that the guys have developed a better method for stabilizing missiles in flight or some such. One of the characters claims that the government could come in and declare their patent and work to be classified and then they would lose their ability to make money off of it.
I can’t imagine that the government could do that. The same way that the government can’t demand that the New York times not publish an article containing info revealed by Snowden. If you signed a NDA that’s one thing but without an NDA there’s nothing they can do.
Didn’t they crack down on nuclear physics research, during the Manhattan Project?
If something really was dangerous, I think there are “emergency powers” that can come in to play. Suppose I developed a mathematical way to break all currently known security systems. That’d be a pretty big threat to national security. I think I want the government “men in black” to come round and take a damn close look at it.
(Obviously, this sort of thing can be taken way too far. The dangerous extension of it comes when “criticizing our beloved leader” is taken as imperiling national security, and then we all go to the Gulag.)
I believe they could but that wouldn’t necessarily cost you the ability to make money. After all, Defense Department over-payments for projects and items are legendary.
With the possible exception of nuclear weapons related developments, which is historically a special case, the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from taking private property without just compensation. The researchers would have to get paid even in some kind of outlandish scenario where their work was hustled off to Area 51.
There are broad powers under ‘National Security’ that might come into play. Whether it would hold up in court is another issue, of course, but the federal government could certainly claim something endangered national security and take a stab at it.
This is definitely a thing. It is also the reason that any invention conceived in the US (whether or not the inventors are citizens or residents) cannot be filed as a patent in any other country without either first filing it in the U.S. or getting a foreign filing license from the U.S. Basically, they want to take a look at it first in case they want to put it under secrecy order.
Let’s be clear here: this law has to do with keeping a patent secret for periods of one year, subject to renewal, and it does not automatically mean that the government seizes the patent for its own use. The law also provides for compensation to be paid to the person whose patent is kept under seal, with judicial review for fairness, etc.
Also, that specific act can’t prevent public disclosure of a non-patented discovery. So, if you just want to improve mankind/disrupt the current national security order, the US Government would have to fall back on something akin to “Born Secret”*.
But if you patent something revolutionary and disruptive (in a way that the National Security organs find interesting), you run the slight risk running afoul of this law.
*“Born Secret” has historically only been applicable to nuclear technology, and is implemented accordingly in the Atomic Energy Act. In this case, all such information regardless of source is regarded as Restricted Data. As defined, that’s just atomic/nuclear information, but I suspect it would only take a new law and corresponding regulation to expand Restricted Data to other technologies.
I think it is interesting that the government seems unwilling to defend the law since it would likely be considered unconstitutional. Lets them continue to harass people until that harassment leads to a court case.
Yeah, a hijack, but my late grandfather was a nuclear scientist and he told me that SOP in case of alleged designs being unveiled to the public was to say nothing if the design would or would not work. Even if it was a picture of Willie E Coyote with a cannonball bomb labelled “nuclear weapon blueprints”, they were not to say anything.
Makes sense actually, since if you say it would work, you tell poeple how to make a bomb, if you say it does not, then you have pointed out one way not to do things and saved some people the time and effort needed to learn.
I learned in another thread that the US government can use its power of Eminent Domain in this sort of case and forcibly purchase the patent. For a fair price, of course.
A couple years ago we were doing some testing on an electronic system and discovered something… unusual. The unexpected result was subsequently deemed Classified.
If you have a patent classified “out of your hands”, the government becomes your sole licensee. They’ll compensate you, but probably not as well as someone else might.
The “compensation” part is basically illusory. From this article:
"The inventors from Michigan agreed in December to a $63,000 settlement. In the 65-year history of the Invention Secrecy Act, this stands out as a rare instance in which the government paid private inventors for a secret patent application. In doing so, the government put an end to a lawsuit that could have developed into a fundamental threat to the law itself. "
I.e., they didn’t get compensated for the patent directly, they were compensated to avoid a Constitutional challenge.
Usually the Government just declares the patent valueless and pays zip. Regardless.
Once the Government declares a matter classified, trying to get anything fixed via the judicial system is incredibly hard. Lots of hurdles: e.g., you and your lawyers have to get security clearance just to be in the room with the judge. You don’t by default have the security clearance needed to talk about your own invention.
It’s an abusive system that needs to be radically modified.
