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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190295733A1/

It doesn't seem to have been examined yet.

Only a single inventor is listed, Salvatore Pais[0]. He's also listed as inventor for a "Laser augmented turbojet propulsion system", "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device", "high frequency gravitational wave generator" (which was granted) and "piezoelectricity-induced room temperature superconductor".

All of which would be massive technological breakthroughs. Meaning he's either the 21st century's most brilliant physicist or a crank.

[0] https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Salvatore+Pais

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Alternatively, could this name be a pseudonym for the research group writ large? It assigns the patent to the whole group to avoid giving any particular team member the credit, and it also avoids identifying any individual who may be regularly dealing with classified information.

I’ve no idea if this is actually possible within the rules of the patent system, though.

This link[0] seems to suggest that filing under a pseudonym is not possible. Full legal name, residence, and citizenship of each inventor must be provided.

And there are criminal penalties for knowingly supplying the patent office with false information[1]:

>1) All statements made therein of the party’s own knowledge are true, all statements made therein on information and belief are believed to be true, and all statements made therein are made with the knowledge that whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the Office, knowingly and willfully falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact, or knowingly and willfully makes any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statements or representations, or knowingly and willfully makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry, shall be subject to the penalties set forth under 18 U.S.C. 1001 and any other applicable criminal statute, and violations of the provisions of this section may jeopardize the probative value of the paper; and ...

[0] https://www.dhuelaw.com/blog/2017/february/is-it-possible-to...

[1] https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s410.html

Remember that the NSA has illegally spied on US citizens for decades. I think the Navy could easily swing a waiver from the Patent Office under the rationale of "national security."

People knew about that though - slashdot had articles on echelon collecting emails 20 years ago but it just didn't make enough of a splash.

Administrative agencies don’t get to waive statutory law.

Why would anonymizing the actual inventor be a matter of national security when they could easily have prevented the patent from being disclosed in the first place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act

Salvatore Pais => Savior of the Country.

Nominative determinism?

His full name is Salvatore Cezar Pais, and supposedly he works for Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division.

You’re not allowed to intentionally falsify the inventorship.

Its a defensive patent scheme. Remember the old days of the internet where people would take boring business model X and patent "doing X on the internet" and try to make millions or billions? The idea is if it costs $5K to file a patent and you think there's a 1 in a 1000 chance of someone actually inventing room temp superconductors soon-ish, then you net profit if you license your patent for more than $5M which seems quite reasonable. Say, for example, GE discovers and commercializes room temp semiconductors, it would be a lot cheaper and faster to pay this guy off (despite him doing nothing) for perhaps $10M than to fight him in court and try to explain to a completely non-technical judge that the guy didn't actually invent anything. Any one patent will almost certainly not pay off, but file enough patents and you'll win the lotto eventually. Somebody out there working independent of the patent guy will eventually invent an actual real world room temp superconductor and the patent guy will get a lot of money for doing, well, essentially nothing.

Really, everyone should be patenting everything in science fiction. We can do the "doing X on the internet" thing with drones. Why hasn't someone patented the idea of "delivery of bags of dogfood ... via drone", that was a classic of dotcom 1.0.

That's fine for room temperature superconductors, but things like gravity manipulation and inertial dampeners are, as far as I know, not even technically feasible. Why even bother with a defensive patent for patent nonsense?

There are several problems with this idea, as I see it:

1. The assignee is the US Navy. He won't personally profit.

2. Protection is given for the claims, not for the abstract, diagrams or specification. The claims have to describe something relatively concrete or they'll be rejected. You can't obtain patents for titles or elevator pitches.

3. Even if it's granted and you think GE infringes, they might disagree. Welcome to patent litigation, which is super expensive.

4. Even if it's not granted, it might be successfully cited as prior art against GE's application. You won't get royalties on nothing.

5. Patents expire. If you're patenting science fiction, yours might expire decades before it's actually possible.

I have filed a patent on my own time and dime. It is much harder than it looks. ~$50,000 USD and hundreds of hours of work over 5+ years.

I'm not sure I got it right:

Did it cost you ~$50k to file your patent?

This is in the ball park for a patent being filed and managed internationally (say Japan, USA and Europe) through all the stages to grant. Which takes ~5 years. And then over it's life cycle - there's a lot of admin. I've been regularly quoted £20k.

Yep. I filed through through WIPO for worldwide priority. Eventually my finances stretched as far as obtaining an Australian patent and a US patent. EU was going to cost tens of thousands for low probability. Chinese patent would've cost another 10k at least and it would be a gamble on the future state of IP enforcement there.

There will be more expenses. $50k was the get as far as the US patent. I've spent another $3k since then on costs arising from other paperwork around it.

That's a cheap patent. Especially given the timescale. Look at it this way. Can you find a lawyer to help shepherd a patent for 5 years and his/her fee is less then 10.000 dollars per year?

I kept down the cost by doing a ton of the legwork myself. Lots of drafting, diagrams, picking apart the examiner's citations etc. But for a lot of it you absolutely need a professional to help.

...and there are ancillary patents, for defense of the original patent, that need to be filed in order to keep up with competition. I have a buddy who has several patents for polishing concrete vertically https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMSR0R8tA8A

The funny thing is - this matches what Bob Lazar claimed to be working on at Area-51:

- A compact energy generator;

- A device that generated gravitational waves;

Is the Navy in on the joke?

Even when Occam's razor would point the way of this being an intel ops to make adversaries waste resources, wouldn't it be cool to be proven wrong, and actually have a sudden and unexpected giant leap forward in science?

But yet again... I wouldn't bet on that.

On one side I can see this is propaganda.

You have plenty of real world scenarios of companies wasting resources on the pursuit of something that looks trivial: like electric vehicles. Yet a lot of them are pulling the plug on something that looked easy, after dumping millions into it, right? "It's just electric motors, a battery and wheels".

If any government goes on a spiral to pursuit these devices it surely is a money furnace.

On the other side, if this is clearly non-sense... don't they have smart people in Russia, China, etc, claiming the same?

Maybe that's the genius of it all: it's so obviously propaganda non-sense that's too much obvious to be propaganda.

Exactly, or maybe it's a weird sense of humor, trolling their friends/adversaries?

I mean, if I worked on secret stuff for years, maybe I would develop that kind of humor, and file a patent application for a Flux Capacitor, just to tease my friends about the time machine we are building...

Fully with you here. But here’s the thing, if your nuclear scientist troll spends one afternoon with the bogus patent application, and the adversary loughs at it after 30 seconds, you end up wasting more resources than them. Which means you need to be sophisticated to troll. War is the art of misdirection, but you can’t fool someone you have a tank when all you have is an umbrella.

What if these are "tanks"? The British didn't want to let anyone know they were building armored vehicles, thus the unassuming name that someone in 1915 would not have guessed what it was. If the Navy has created a groundbreaking new device, but they want to hide its true nature, a far-fetched name like "gravitational wave", even though it's not the theoretical gravity wave it sounds like, lets you talk about it without an eavesdropper knowing what it is. That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes.

> That term, and "inertial mass reduction" have never been used in a patent before so the inventor is free to define them however he likes.

I'm apparently not familiar enough with the patent system. It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.

While I agree with you and I think parent's wording isn't the best, I think parent's point is that military tanks aren't liquid tankers or holding tanks like the term would have meant when the term was first used for military tanks, and military tanks were called that specifically to give little insight into what they did. Now no one takes issue with a military tank being called a tank.

> It seems like a pretty enormous flaw in the system if the first person to request a patent on the subject could completely redefine terms that have pretty unambiguous scientific meanings.

Yup patent trolls make millions through this flaw they get the most vague patents they can and then sue everyone they see, they only need to win one case with a sleepy judge to make their money back.

If you want to hide it, filing a patent application is a pretty dumb move.

This matches Bob Lazar’s description only in the very general sense of using the same alien-technology buzzwords that are used everywhere by cranks and conspiracy theorists. The details though are very different from what Bob Lazar described.

Who’s Bob Lazar? The guy from that hokey Netflix documentary?

Conflicted on this, on one hand things listed make it all sound crackpot. Then again he is listed as a researcher in Navy R&D (http://www.navair.navy.mil/nawcad/)

Also is that typical for supposedly cutting edge things from a defense perspective to get patented before a functional use case is demonstrated?

He's got some interesting papers out there https://www.sae.org/publications/technical-papers/content/20...

Or a nom de plume.

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