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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

an interesting conundrum: if you make something deemed too dangerous to be sold abroad, is the government obligated to buy it from you?

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Because it has effectively become the government's property. What else would you call it? If they control where it goes, who can look at it, how many can exist or be built. Those and many more are property rights. US Govt needs to pay up seeing as this is a fully mature platform. If it was just some drawings on paper then they wouldn't owe a dime.

Replace "boat" with nuke and the argument starts to sound ridiculous. If I happen to find some plutonium in my backyard and build an improvised WOMD in my garage i dont expect the government to be obliged to sign a contract for buying 100s of them. Nor do I expect to be able to sell them to Isis, Japan, my neighbor or whoever else is ready to pay. In fact I would expect to be thrown into jail without even seeing court.

>>Replace "boat" with nuke and the argument starts to sound ridiculous.

Why would one do that, there is no law agaist making a boat, it is criminal to make a nuclear device.

Thus your argument is not only a Straw man but a moronic one at that.

>>>In fact I would expect to be thrown into jail without even seeing court.

Really? Then I feel sorry for the world you want to exist in. Even if you did build said nuke, I would expect you to get Due Process, but charged under the criminal laws of the land, and be held to account by a Jury of your peers

To believe the government should have the authority to throw you in jail with out trail is extremely dangerous.

The whole idea was to make the argument moronic to show the extreme end of the spectrum. Somewhere you have to draw the line, when does the boat become a weapon? Some weapons are also legal to posses, but others aren't, where do you draw that line? Is a kitchen knife a weapon? A sword? Are you allowed to export a sword? a gun? a RPG? armored personnel transport? A tank? A Helicopter? A jet fighter? Cryptography? Radars?

Regarding the court it's definitely not expressing my opinion, more like extra spices on the rant :) In case that wasn't obvious.

I agree with the need for courts.

Apart from that there is a lot not criminal, but highly suspect:

+ 200W laser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzUoe-9bKa0 + machine gun on quad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNPJMk2fgJU

Say you make a new kind of drug, the government is allowed to regulate it and prevent you from selling it. That doesn't oblige the government to compensate you for making something dangerous.

I am 100% against regulation of Drugs, and the War on drugs so I would say no..

But even under current laws, if you make a new drug the government must go through a process to make it regulated and classify it. It is not automatically illegal.

By default all things are LEGAL until they are made ILLEGAL, not the other way around. The one exception to this is Medication, where in order to claim it treats as specific illness it must be approved by the FDA to treat that illness, the drug itself if not illegal per say, it just can not be proscribed by a doctor to treat X until it is approved to do so.

Further even in the regulations of Dangerous drugs they do not prevent someone from finding a market in other nations for them. There are a whole host of medications that have been not been approved by the FDA that are sold in other nations.

If its dangerous, then it is not a drug.

EDIT: If its only dangerous.

Plenty of drugs can be dangerous if they are misused and not properly regulated. You can grow poppies in your backyard, as long as you don't know/expect to milk them for opium.

First, a single prototype isn't a mature platform.

Second, what makes drawings suddenly less worthy of compensation than a single prototype? Don't they have value?

Third, it's not like the rules suddenly changed here. He knew the rules going in, and he built something he couldn't sell. That's a failure to find a market. Your idea opens up a scam of building impractical, yet dangerous weapons for government compensation.

How can he find a market if he's prohibited from selling it even to US allies?

> Because it has effectively become the government's property. What else would you call it?

Danegeld.

Why would they be?

Well, in some way, aren't they partially seizing some of your property rights, and hence subject to the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment? I mean, sure, they aren't actually using it, but property is about control, not use.

They have the right to invalidate your patent, since that is a government-granted monopoly in the first place.

But the secrecy order is a separate matter.

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