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This is a video about a government secret.
It’s not about bricks.
It’d be weird to think it was a video about bricks because the title and thumbnail make
very clear that it’s not about bricks, but still, some of you seem to think for some
reason that our videos are sometimes about bricks.
So, moving on, if you were to invent a hoolywhatsit that goes babadeeboo, or a twirly-whirbett
that goes shwing-whoom, or a gizzamazoo that goes feedledeedee, you might want to get a
patent for it.
But what if, instead of inventing a hoolywhatsit or a twirly-whirbett or a gizamazoo, you invented
a gun that shoots people until they’re dead?
Well, if you tried to patent that, you may find it added to the list of 5,915 secret
patents that the US government is currently suppressing.
“But,” you the beloved yet naive viewer asks, “why would the government need to
suppress patents?”
Well, the key thing to understand here is that when you file for a patent on a thingy,
in order to ensure nobody copies your thingy, you have to describe exactly how to make said
thingy.
Patents, however, are public documents, so once your patent is approved, everyone will
know exactly how to make the thingy—they just won’t be allowed to make it until your
patent runs out, typically in 20 years.
But once your patent expires, anyone from rival businesses to America’s sweetheart
Al Roker can take a swing at thingy-making—not to mention, people could start making it before
then, so long as they don’t care about old Johnny Law.
Patent suppression dates back to World War I, when Americans wanted to patent weapons
and stuff, but also punch the Krauts across their weinershnitzel-loving faces, which they
figured would be harder if the Krauts knew what weapons and stuff they were inventing.
And so, the US Patent and Trademark Office started to give the military permission to
request that secrecy orders be put on certain patent applications—a permission they granted
once again during World War II: Trolls World 2-War.
A few years after that, Congress decided to keep the good patent-suppressing times rolling,
and passed the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, called such because it was enacted in 1952,
which made the process permanent.
To explain that process, let’s say you invent an invisible gun laser bomb.
Then, you file for a patent for your invisible gun laser bomb to the US Patent and Trademark
Office.
They get the application, and they look at it and go, “hey look it’s a patent application,
we get these all the time, because we’re the patent office” and then they’ll read
it and they’ll go “oh gee willikers golly gosh, this patent is for an invisible laser
gun bomb.
If we publish it, then everyone will know how to make an invisible laser gun bomb, and
then our enemies will hit us with unseeable radiated bullet explosions.”
It would then be flagged by the USPTO’s “commissioner of patents” and sent to
and reviewed by government agencies, who could then request that it be classified, restricted
from export, or only given to defense agencies.
You, the inventor, would then be legally restricted from filing any foreign patents for, or even
telling anyone about, your invisible laser gun bomb, lest you face a $10,000 fine and/or
two years in prison.
Now, we don’t know all the criteria used for secrecy orders, because, you know, secrecy,
but thanks to a declassified document from 1971, we do know what categories were getting
flagged for review 50 years ago.
There were 22, shown here, that ranged from the expected Explosives and Inflammables;
to the less expected Meteorology; to the shocking and controversial Miscellaneous.
We can also take a look at patents whose suppression orders have recently been rescinded, available
in this massive and unhelpful excel document that makes you copy and paste the patent numbers
into google to find out what they are.
In 2014 they rescinded the order on a method of making warheads with explosives, in 2015
they rescinded the order on a laser pointer tracker system, and in 2021 they’re expected
to reveal the patent that allowed a robot to run a social media platform.
Now, while you probably think that government agencies having free rein to restrict the
innovation and speech of Americans would be a perfect system with no flaws, it turns out
that there are some concerns.
In particular, experts are worried that, like Germany sometimes, the system can be overly
aggressive.
In the last five years, 471 new secrecy orders were issued, and of those, 200 were what are
called “John Doe” secrecy orders, which apply to inventions of individuals or private
businesses—not government contractors.
One problem with the system is a simple first amendment concern—these orders amount to
what the creepy robe people call “prior restraint”—stopping someone from saying
something before they’ve actually said it, and the constitutional bar for that should,
at least in theory, be really really, Snoop-Dogg-level high.
The second concern is that these orders can suppress innovation—declassified documents
from 1971 show that the USPTO nearly put a secrecy order on solar panels when they were
first invented, because of their military space potential, and just imagine if we lived
in a world where we didn’t have solar panels: we might not have already solved climate change!
Plus, as any Guantanamo Bay prisoner can tell you, the US government is often just really
slow to act—the USPTO has been known not to rescind secrecy orders until decades after
the technology has become completely obsolete.
Once a secrecy order has been issued, there’s not even a lot that these poor inventing nerds
can do—they could ask the USPTO to reconsider, but that rarely works; last year, only eight
secrecy orders were rescinded, which means that 2020 had more Republicans vote for impeachment
than rescinded secrecy orders.
Ultimately, we don’t know what kind of great inventions the world doesn’t have access
to because of these secrecy orders.
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