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Comment by brianberns | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have a problem with it. This prevents a private entity from monopolizing a possibly world-changing invention. The government can auction licenses to create competition, or even give it away for free.

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This kind of technology would be so world-changing that I can't believe anyone with the knowledge and capability to develop it would actually allow something like patent law get in their way. Whomever gets this working basically becomes a godlike power compared to the rest of humanity. Who cares what the lawyers say at that point, let them try to subpoena you at the Mars colony that houses your space fleet.

This made me crack up, thank you

I think it's more about preventing international private entities from profiting. AFAIK, they would get the same anti-monopoly effect just publishing about it because nobody can patent prior art.

U.S. patents are only enforceable within U.S. territories. And if the tech truly were break-through, even if the patent were enforceable outside the U.S., no foreign government would comply.

No it doesn't. There's no monopoly without a patent.

The best way to prevent a private entity patenting an invention and monopolising it themselves, is to patent it first. Proving prior art is notoriously difficult and patent reviewers frequently overlook even obvious examples, but pre-existing patents are impossible to ignore. So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.

> So the government patents them to preserve broad access to the invention.

I would assume or at like to believe this is true with federal government patents, but it's not true for state governments, government-funded universities, etc. It would be nice to have a law or official policy to point to that states outright that the federal government can't or won't sue anyone for using the technology in those patents (or the opposite).

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