
Patents Awarded to Formerly Secret Inventions - jacquesm
http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2015/11/patents-awarded/
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ISL
As a scientist, I can imagine few things more frustrating than submitting an
article for publication or filing a patent on an important discovery, only to
have the work classified.

In the case of these patents, they all appear to have been filed by companies
that contract with the government, so the classification may have been with
the assent of the researchers.

Kudos to FAS for keeping watch on classification. They're perhaps the only
non-government organization I'm aware of that attempts to make a list of which
things are classified (the official list is, of course, classified). Without
such a list, it's impossible to know whether the right things have been
classified.

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yaur
Two of the linked patents are pretty clearly weapons related and the third
comes out of a lab that specializes in national security (among other things)
so I would assume that all of the researches knew going into it that
classification of the research was a likely outcome.

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x1798DE
Does anyone know what the mechanism is for these deferred patent grants? Is
there a special carve-out for government classified patents in the law, or is
this within the discretion of the USPTO?

It really seems like you should either have to file and publish in a
reasonable timeframe or just not be granted a patent at all. Otherwise, you
could "classify" your patents until someone else is on the verge of re-
inventing it, then declassify it and have your cake and eat it too.

~~~
hedgehog
The application for the first one is not obvious to me but the other two look
like they had immediate applications in missile systems. Looking at what they
were doing and who the employers were they probably came about as part of
government-funded research and so the customer would have reviewed all of the
output as a matter of course.

~~~
x1798DE
Maybe you misunderstood me, but I meant the legal mechanism by which you can
defer publication/examination of a filed patent for over 20 years before
having it granted. It seems to me that that is a de facto increase of the
patent term, so I was wondering whether there's a statutory provision for this
and if so, where.

~~~
hedgehog
I see, yes it would be interesting to know how that works.

