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Eminent Domain Applied to IP Due To State Secrets
NormalVisual writes "Wired recently ran a story about a group of inventors that found themselves unable to sue Lucent Technologies for infringement of a patent they held on a novel design for a pipe/cable connector. They had been working with Lucent on an underwater application for this connector, but unfortunately for the inventors, Lucent's application was being developed for an as-yet-unnamed branch of the U.S. government. The government is now claiming a state-secret privilege, and is refusing to let the inventors sue Lucent for patent infringement, citing national security concerns. In the meantime, Lucent continues to directly profit from their invention without paying any royalties or other compensation. The patent in question can be found online. It's doubly a shame because, unlike so many other patents that we've seen here, this one is actually creative and non-obvious." We've touched on this topic before.
So we want Chinese peasants to pay to watch "Steamboat Willie", but real, live inventors are SOL. God, what a country!
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Sounds more like theft than eminent domain. With eminent domain, the government takes your stuff but has to give you market value for it. Here, they're just taking patents away from the inventor. OK, maybe not taking away, but denying the holders of that patent the right to use it in this specific case, which is just as good as taking it away.
If its a foregone conclusion that the 'Government Agency' are using this tech as provided by Lucent then I don't see how 'state secret' can be a problem (or excuse).
If the 'Government Agency' is allowed this holier-than-thou stance then the plaintiff should just be able to ask: Are you using our tech as provided by Lucent? The agency can then just say yay or nay.
I'm pretty sure the value of the defence contract for Lucent isn't any kind of secret so the courts should award a *fair* share of that ammount to the plaintiff if it is found that Lucent infringed their IP.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
So can someone tell me which criteria of fascism we haven't had happen yet.
1) the company didn't get any cash, like they would in an eminent domain case
2) the company still has patent rights for other uses. Lucent can't license the patent to others for any non-secret projects.
It's more like Lucent is engaging in software or music piracy and thanks to "Kings-X" getting away with it.
Now, if the patent holders refused to license the patent at all, or put onerous restrictions on it, and the government siezed the patent in toto so industry could license it, and paid off the patent owner, that would be eminent domain.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Are patents evil, or are they good?
...because you know everything has to be one or the other. It's not like some things could be beneficial when applied in certain ways (like traditional patents on non-obvious inventions) and yet be detrimental when used in other ways (patenting business ideas, existing inventions, existing common practices or ideas with "on the internet" appended, software patents, etc.). Can't someone please come up with simple absolute rules for everything so we don't have to think?
It's hard to let Slashdot tell me what to think when they post stories on _both_ sides of an argument!
Yeah we all hate it when a discussion site posts both good and bad things done by a person, organization, or process. That might foster, well discussion.
Man I hope you're trying to be funny, because some days I really can't tell on Slashdot anymore.
No power gives the government the ability to take property from you and give it to someone else without compensation. Yet, in this case, that is the result. Why? It's a loophole, and Lucent has exploited it marvelously.
Consider: The executive priviledge in question (and the court case cited) gives the government the ability to restrict the release of information deemed important to national security. That's all.
How did Lucent exploit this to their advantage? They promised to pay for the technology, signed contracts and everything. Then they simply didn't pay. Now, it's up to the screwed party in this case, the plaintiff, to sue for recompense. The plaintiff brings suit. And, in the course of the trial, the plaintiff requests discovery from Lucent to verify it's claims and help make it's case.
Uh-oh. Here's where Big Brother steps in. The government says "you can't talk about that" to the courts, and to both parties. Now what is the plaintiff supposed to do? What evidence can he use? There's probably a contract that details specific technology that they now can't disclose. If they blot out the parts that are sensitive, Lucent can use that to claim reasonable doubt. They can't investigate Lucent to find out that they actually took and used said technology, because Lucent can't reveal that information to the court. The plaintiff is completely screwed, against all logic and reason.
I especially love the quote from the Lucent representative: "You can't try this case in your publication". They understand the issues well enough to know how to screw people; and they did it intentionally.
This is becoming more and more common. I have high voltage power lines, 100 ft tall, in my back yard. Yet, I never gave permission to the power company to put them there. I rejected their low offer when they called to try to purchase an easement, and they said "fine". They never filed condemnation proceedings to take the land. They simply built the power lines illegally, over my objections. They can do this because, in Oklahoma, the constitution provides that the maximum damages for them doing so are the same as the cost of the easement. The most it will cost them is what a judge decides the easement is worth. But, now, it's up to me to file suit to get those damages, which means I'll probably just end up with their low offer minus attorney fees.
And they do this as a matter of course, to everyone. It's fascism by definition.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Of course, doing this would make major patent holders a little more nervous, but it's still a more equitable resultion under the rule of law than "no, you can't sue him, even though you're getting screwed." In the meanwhile, all these guys can do under the current mess is fall back on "peacable petition for redress of grievances"... which is not likely to be effective in this political climate.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The Constitution forbids taking private property for public use without just compensation. If the Feds want to take the "intellectual property" for "National Security" or whatever reasons, they are required to compensate them - assuming the patent owner files a lawsuit in the right form asking the right questions. Doesn't sound like they've done that yet.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
They're not claiming eminent domain, and the original article doesn't mention it; that's from the summary written by the submitter.
They're claiming instead something called the state secrets privilege, which has nothing to do with property (intellectual or otherwise) but rather with quashing the lawsuit. Eminent domain has to do with real, not intellectual, property, since it is a "taking", and as is incessantly pointed out on Slashdot you can't "take" intellectual property.
What that big state secret is, of course, I can't say, since most of the filings in the case are (duh) secret.
In other words, the government isn't claiming that it has any rights to the patent; it's just claiming that the guy isn't allowed to sue, because that would violate some big state secret.
So they get to use the patent, with no legal right to it, but what kind of right is it that you can't enforce under the law? No right at all. Sound like a totalitarian regime to you? Gold star!
The difference here is that Lucent is PROFITING from IP they stole from the inventors. There's nothing they can do while Lucent will continue to commit theft in (likely) an ongoing sole-source contract to provide connectors.
Perhaps the inventors should talk to someone from the Global Intellectual Property Rights Academy?
This has absolutely nothing to do with eminent domain. It would be better for the inventor if it was eminent domain, becuase under that doctrine he'd have to be paid a fair market value for his property. Under this, a more favored vendor is allowed to steal is property, and the government is taking away his right to defend his property in the name of national security. It has nothign to do with the government taking the property itself.
This is the state secrecy doctrine. It says to right in the friggen linked article, with a highly informative blurb in the third paraqraph:
I refer you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_Domain for more information on Emininent Domain and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Secrets_Privil
The linked article would have been more informative if they had mentioned "US vs. Reynolds", the 1953 case in which the US Supreme Court which actually established the privilege in the US . In that case, the widows of three crew members of a B-29 sued the US government for information relating to a crash that killed their husbands. The US government claimed that since they were working on a classified project, divulging the accident report would undermine national security.
As it turned out, they lied. There was nothing sensitive at all in the accident report. There was embarassing information about incompetence and negligence in the maintenance of the aircraft. Which goes to show what Ben Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." There is nothing more dangerous to liberty than allowing the government to act without accountability, purely on its say so.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can't someone please come up with simple absolute rules for everything so we don't have to think?
1 - Microsoft, SCO, MPAA, RIAA, & all corporations unless noted in rule 2 = Bad
2 - Linux, Google, Apple, AMD = Good
3 - DRM, outsourcing = Bad
4 - Open source, P2P = Good
5 - Patents, Copyright = Bad, unless being used against a big corp
6 - Goverment = Bad unless they are installing WiFi in your town
7 - NASA = Good, unless they say they will not keep Hubble in space
8 - USA = Arrogant
9 - Religion = only post flames, any intelligent conversation for or against religion will be ignored
10 - In Soviet Russia, Does it run Linux, Beowulf Cluster, I for one welcome, etc = overused, but still must be modded +5 funny
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
with the pharmaceutical industry getting a lot of their basic research performed in public institutions with government grants, and then getting to patent the drug, we're the one's getting screwed. Twice!!
Yeap! BMS, Bristol-Myers Squibb, using Taxol is an excellent example. The NCI, National Cancer Institute, part of the fed's National Health Institute spent $183 million doing the research into developing Taxol from the Pacific Yew tree. Yet they practically gave away to BMS, who makes more than a billion dollars a year on the sale of Taxol, the "rights" to use all of the data from the clinical trials. The US tax payer got ripped off!!! And cancer patients who need Taxol are getting ripped off as well.
FalconShould there be a Law?