Japan to pay companies to keep sensitive patents secret
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://www.upcounsel.com/classified-patents
"In 2017, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reported statistics that there were over 5,700 classified patents held by the United States government. These inventions are highly guarded under sensitive secrecy orders. The public may never know more about these classified inventions, but some once-secret patents included a laser-tracking system, a stronger net, and a warhead-production method.
Invention secrecy dates back to the 1930s, but exploded in the 1940s when nuclear weapon development became a highly classified topic. Under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, federal law prevented the disclosure of new technologies and inventions that may present a national security threat to the United States."
If I re-invent/re-discover the tech behind a secret patent, can I be sued for patent infringement, despite the patent being non-public? What's the point of granting patents for this?
If, sitting in your garage/basement, you invent a tech covered by a secret patent then you will be getting a job offer. If you market that tech then you will probably be arrested for dealing in weapons or other heavily-controlled material. Building missile guidance systems or uranium enrichment centrifuges is not something done by home tinkerers.
Or being told to shut up and get lost. And can't sue back because the lawsuit will be dismissed on the basis of national security.
You sound like KGB. Person can invent tech for what them thinks is a totally peaceful purpose and have no idea that it has high military value in some specific field. Fucking witch hunt attitude.
People say things like this and then it turns out to be useful for ornithologists who want to use drones to tag wild birds.
You never know what something is useful for until somebody uses it for that.
Then all the terrorists you encounter are carrying ornithology equipment because their organization's lawyers told them to and/or actual ornithologists go to prison because they also bought some fireworks for independence day or have a cousin who lives in Iran.
It's based on contracts. Before the government will give you classified information, you agree not to share it except under particular terms.
It's why the New York Times can publish the Pentagon Papers even though they're classified. They never agreed not to.
But now people want to pretend there is some separate "national security" that overrides the First Amendment in cases of excessive government embarrassment even for people who never agreed not to publish whatever they want to.
Somebody tell me where in the constitution it says "Congress shall pass no law abridging the freedom of speech except when the government wants to keep something a secret."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798
NYT gets away with it because they'd probably get off on a freedom of press defense, but the DoJ doesn't want to turn grey legal theory into case law. It's more useful to leave the possibility open that it won't go that way as a cudgel. But in the general case, national security restrictions to freedom of speech have passed judicial muster.
In other words, it's plausibly unconstitutional.
It's also kind of hilarious that the specific thing you're not allowed to disclose is how cryptosystems work, which is the thing all cryptographers agree doesn't have to be a secret in order to be secure or else your cryptosystem is completely broken and shouldn't be used.
And I was wrong, it's hit the supreme court in NYT vs US. The majority opinion is a purely press freedom argument, with a joint press freedom/speech freedom argument being a minority concurring opinion.
There's plenty of case law that the government can stifle speech for national security purposes, and it's not limited to signed contracts for enforcement.
That case is talking about freedom of the press for the obvious reason that the parties there are the New York Times and Washington Post; print publications. Where are you getting the idea that the same wouldn't apply to freedom of speech?
It's kind of a bizarre distinction in modern society regardless. Speech and press were historically different. Speaking you did in front of a crowd, the press was in print. Today both happen over the internet. Are we supposed to treat it differently based on whether your website contains text or audio/video? Why?
> There's plenty of case law that the government can stifle speech for national security purposes
In which case did the Supreme Court say that?
Because the concurring, but minority opinion is a joint press freedom and speech freedom argument, but the majority of the court didn't agree with the argument, hence it being a minority concurring opinion.
> In which case did the Supreme Court say that?
For one example of many, Near v Minnesota.
"No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops."
And what if I am developing a generic guidance system and somehow figured out the way to do everything with 1mm precision? It has immense value for civil use. Same for military. I would have very good explanation on how I intend to use it for peaceful purpose.
But access to classified information isn’t just granted by a clearance, you also require need to know. This is to prevent (in theory) anyone with a clearance from looking at every piece of classified info they feel like, which would be an operational security risk.
Having a pool of classified patents that are shared freely with only cleared people working at defense contractors would violate that safeguard.
I bet they don't even refund the patent fees.
Some government contracts will assign such spontaneous discoveries to the government with some incentive on the contract for patents produced.
Without the patent system, some discoveries would simply be forgotten about or remain in one engineers head - unfortunately the patent world has become fairly bloated with minimally inventive discoveries being written up by lawyers.
They sidestep around the issue (probably a bit illegally) with their self-defense forces but there are some purely offensive technologies, like nuclear weapons, that even that sidestepping has yet managed to work around.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_9_of_the_Japanese_Cons...
This is absolutely not true. Nuclear weapons have many non-weapon usages, and they would be really good for those, too. Like excavations, shutting down runaway oil well fires, protecting against stuff striking earth, etc.
The very nature of patents is that the government grants exclusivity of the invention to the inventor, so long as the inventor shares the invention with the world. That's why there were lawsuits about Viagra: Pfizer knew which compounds in it caused the effect, but their patent was vague and didn't specify. In Canada, the patent was voided over this.[0]
Calling it a 'secret patent' just confuses the idea of what a patent is meant to be.
[0]https://www.smartbiggar.ca/insights/publication/supreme-cour...
Thus, a secret patent is a contradiction in terms.
> The patents under review in the proposed economic security legislation will include technology that can help develop nuclear weapons, such as uranium enrichment and cutting-edge innovations like quantum technology, the financial daily said.
It seems that they are basically asking companies to be quiet if they are making something for military use. Not sure about the quantum part.
Can one jam normal accelerometers? I don't see how.
My understanding is ICBMs use it. It could be used by UAVs to get within a few miles of the target, and then use visual / IR / radar to to get to a more precise location.
The US does that too, if you try to file a patent for something that has military applications.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/05/the-thousands-of-secret...
I'm not sure if the US even provides compensation like the Japanese government is going to.
It seems like it's going to affect a relatively narrow niche.
FOIA requests are not going to get you actively classified patents in the US either...
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
Things that are secret are called “trade secrets”.
My initial thought was the article had gotten confused and the gov was saying “leave this as a trade secret and we’ll compensate you if it gets leaked”
But it actually seems that they’re looking at patents as being pure license revenue driven and the compensation would be 20 years of licensing revenue.
But that’s not the only reason for parents. They are primarily intended as a way of having a legally enforced monopoly on something. So what happens in this system if you have a patent that gives you a competitive advantage, but another company works out what you’ve done, checks to see if you’ve patented it (which they won’t find), and then implements the technology themselves?
Licensing revenue may be significantly less than the benefits of being the only people able to use the tech.
One of the NSA's original and continuous missions have been what they refer to as "technology retrieval", a fancy way of saying "theft and espionage". It should be pretty clear by now that their mission have influences on American technology, CPUs and operating systems being most relevant to this.
Since a few years back (mostly after the NSA and CIA leaks) I firmly believe that if you are using Intel or AMD CPUs and are running Windows or macOS, and if your computer is connected to the internet and can clearly be identified, then all and any information in it can be retrieved.
It's definitely a good thing that the Japanese still prefer keeping sensitive documents and paperwork on actual paper.
Secret patents are an overreach of IP laws.
Though I suppose you could argue there would be less incentive and competition and drive to innovate if that were the case. Still interesting to wonder about.
I believe that will happen before we reach Type 2 at the Kardashev scale.
The question now is how do we reach Type 1 asap (hopefully within the next 50 years)
Kardashev is a measurement of energy access/use. So we build lots of new power plants. Everyone starts driving giant vehicles. That should get our energy consumption up enough for Type 1. It's an old scale that doesn't acknowledge that a very advanced civilization may decide not to use all the energy it theoretically could.
That sounds like optimizing for KPI to me, in which case we'll be doing it wrong.
The only way to arrive there naturally is to have more efficient ways of generating energy (fusion, renewable, etc).
> ... advanced civilization may decide not to use all the energy it theoretically could
Energy generation & consumption (which are both tied to future prices, etc) always appear to be a game-theoretical optimization at geopolitcal and social-economical scales. Even in the current days (eg gazprom, nato, etc.)
When we reach Type 1, we would have greatly reduced the cost of energy (resource-cost and enviromental-impact wise) and global economy will become more intervined and convoluted. The social-cultural implication would be fascinating too. Many existing status quos will crumble as the cost-to-transform skyrockets [1]. (Also: eg perhaps that's when crypto finally makes sense and become stable?)
In 2019, 1.4 million US adults tried to kill themselves. 47,511 died. Why do so many survive? It is because information about effective ways to commit suicide exist but is not well disseminated. Men have a fraction of the suicide attempts of women, and yet commit suicide at several times the rate. Suicide rates are also unevenly distributed across races. By my understanding, the primary reason for these differences is that men and specific races are more likely to pick an effective suicide method.
Teenagers are particularly likely to be suicidal and grow out of it. As the parent of such a teenager, I'm perfectly OK with not disseminating knowledge about the most effective ways that she could try to kill herself with common household items.
(I'm also happy to disseminate the knowledge that the method you should never use is drinking anti-freeze. You will not kill yourself. You will destroy your liver and kidneys, and will make your life suck a whole lot more than it does already.)
Here in Germany we owe most of our modern institutions (one of the first healthcare systems, the national education system) to Prussia, in France the Napoleonic code was one of the most important reforms in history, and most of that nation-building was driven by militaristic nation-state competition. The Cold War is another example of course. He argues that war is the primary thing that pushes states to improve the welfare of their populations and it enables larger organization. Israel is probably another good example of a country whose innovation is effectively driven by survival.
I think you can make a decent case that the sort of post-Soviet stagnation, lack of reform or interest in taking care of pressing domestic issues, over-financialization etc.. was driven largely by being stuck in a unipolar system without competition.
[1]https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-true-size-of-africa/
The accelerating technological dynamic that put Europe ahead of everyone else along the Silk Road had a different dynamic. One of whose key ingredients was the lack of any central authority who could suppress discoveries and lines of research for whatever political or religious reasons. And once that turned into a runaway train of progress, well, everyone was backwards compared to them!
Except in telecommunications, surgery, and metallurgy, subsaharan Africa wasn't ahead of Europe, China, and India even before the early modern ramp-up in the slave trade, but it wasn't nearly as far off as you'd extrapolate from looking at the ruins after 500 years of enslavement and colonialism.
Powerful African states like the Ashanti empire, Dahomey and Kanem Bornu empire grew and based much of their economy on the wealth of the slave trade, benefiting at the expense of their weaker neighbors whom they "exported", and collapsed only after the slave trade was over, in part because of the loss of that trade revenue. In general, the conquest and colonization (beyond trade posts) of sub-Saharan Africa does not overlap at all with the years of trans-Atlantic slave trade, the collapse of pretty much all the African empires and kingdoms came starting from 1880 after the slave trade had ended.
And of course there are earlier great African empires like Mali and Songhai and Kush, but again their collapse had nothing to do with "the onslaught of the slave trade". Arguably the causality is the other way around - the peoples whose empires collapsed due to attacks by neighbours or internal fighting became the victims of the slave trade afterwards, benefiting the economy of their victorious neighboring African empires/kingdoms who then kept raiding the less unified areas for slaves.
I once saw a simple rocket control method removed from Hackaday because of a similar reason. It was basically, motorized fins to control direction.