How the government can legally hide your patent
It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, except for the fact that they aren't paying you to keep it secret, they're just preventing you from talking about OR exploiting it for any reason.
From the article:
"Private inventors who have asked for compensation haven’t been successful, thanks to an ironclad Catch-22: The inventions are secret and so, by definition, lack a market because the ideas in the patent applications can't be publicly revealed. That makes it impossible to demonstrate how much money is being lost by the impact of government secrecy. Government lawyers facing these cases have routinely argued that there is no evidence that the inventors would have made any money from their ideas."
So one can't effectively argue damages because one can't market the idea in the first place... Chicken meet egg.
From the article:
"Private inventors who have asked for compensation haven’t been successful, thanks to an ironclad Catch-22: The inventions are secret and so, by definition, lack a market because the ideas in the patent applications can't be publicly revealed. That makes it impossible to demonstrate how much money is being lost by the impact of government secrecy. Government lawyers facing these cases have routinely argued that there is no evidence that the inventors would have made any money from their ideas."
So one can't effectively argue damages because one can't market the idea in the first place... Chicken meet egg.
Any comment, Dale?
Shesh...at least they could of given the guy a tax break or something. Any money they could of given him would come out of our pockets and the invention would of belonged to "America" not the government as far as I see it. The government here is acting like an independent company.