You're right, that was a bit generic. To put them in context I'll have to stretch my speculation...
Indenture of Employees - If the Polywell works, Rick will be making plenty of money if he is a free agent to consult - though I imagine he is too busy to be planning it like that.
Contradiction between Patents and Public Research - The project has become more visible at the higher levels of govenment. Someone high up thinks a strategic view of national security is for the world to be energy secure, and the best way to speed this up uptake is to avoid putting up barriers.
Loss of Liberty to Customers - They are respecting Bussard's supposed ideals on wide distribution of the technology. End-user customisation will lead to more design variations and research.
Delays in Publication - Rick benefits in his academic profession from not having others beat him to the punch.
Technical Lock-in and Research Avoidance - I don't think they've got this under consideration. Its only a general comment.
Actually, I think perhaps they are just too busy to respond to the rejection of the patent. Or, their understanding has moved such that the original patent is not quite right.
Polywell's current patent application.
...and if you don't drag it out, the USPTO does!scareduck wrote:It was a patent application. You can drag those things out forever. Patent trolls do exactly that.MSimon wrote:[Dude. The key patent has expired. They are not called temporary monopolies for nothing.
That's right, it could've been held in limbo, or just finalised. Someone's actively lost interest at the very final hurdle.
Remember guys, the WB-8 contract explicitly asks for a WB-9 design.
The vagaries of patent law being what they are, this doesn't seem worth worrying a lot about. It might just be that Bussard's death invalidates the petition, or someone at EMC2 forgot to keep it going, they don't care, they're going to patent the WB-9 design instead, or who knows what.
It's silly to think they are abandoning Polywell in the middle of the WB-8 contract based on this.
The vagaries of patent law being what they are, this doesn't seem worth worrying a lot about. It might just be that Bussard's death invalidates the petition, or someone at EMC2 forgot to keep it going, they don't care, they're going to patent the WB-9 design instead, or who knows what.
It's silly to think they are abandoning Polywell in the middle of the WB-8 contract based on this.
This is only true if it is the ITEM that is to be marketed, not the product of the item. In this case, the product (electricity) is so widely and earnestly desired that if Polywell works, the power companies will either independantly or in consortium, design and build these items. Lack of patent protection would probably be a GOOD thing in that case.chrismb wrote:...these have the effect of making it non-viable to progress a design if it is not protected.
The promise of patent protection is supposed to be an INDUCEMENT TO DEVELOP. In this case, the Navy is providing that service.
Interesting point, I was not thinking of it in that way. Yet (as we are speaking of the US government) I think it would have been more easy to simply secret the whole project under one of the various "national interest" laws they do normally use.MirariNefas wrote: In short, it protects them from being scooped, and doesn't help anybody else to use their work, while not legally prohibiting anyone else from using or selling their design (if anybody else can figure out that design on their own).
Industries do this to establish a "trade secret".
Is this also what the military does when they don't want their secret designs to be disclosed to the public?
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TheRadicalModerate
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There are limits on what you can modify without getting into restriction problems. In general, you can only patent one basic idea per application (although you can have multiple independent claims that relate to various aspects of the idea).scareduck wrote:Then they could modify the application! But to abandon it?Aero wrote:Or it might be that they have learned enough new stuff to realize that the patent as applied for does not protect the important stuff well enough to be worth pursuing.
The general strategy that most companies use is to file a broad claim early on to establish a date for the invention. However, that starts the clock running for when the patent expires (not the date of allowance--go figure). So what you do is you then dribble out a set of continuation claims that can effectively reset the clock and give you a longer period of exclusivity after allowance.
I agree that a full abandonment looks bad, unless they discovered that the IP in the original wasn't really the secret sauce, and that a continuation claim wasn't possible due to restriction requirements. Maybe the Navy made funding contingent upon abandoning the IP? That sounds really weird.
I wonder if there are other unpublished patents lurking in USPTO that we don't know about. I've never understood the publication rules on applications, but they can remain secret (or at least unsearchable) for a while in some cases.
(BTW, Scareduck, I didn't realize that that was you over on Reason until after I'd re-posted--I obviously found your sourcing info!)
Nuclear exceptions
It is my understanding that certain nuclear processes are not patentable under US law. This stems from the early days of the national laboratories and national security concerns. Does anyone have details on/confirmation of this?
I'm referring to the 1987 (I think) patent.scareduck wrote:It was a patent application. You can drag those things out forever. Patent trolls do exactly that.MSimon wrote:[Dude. The key patent has expired. They are not called temporary monopolies for nothing.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.