U.S. Navy Patents the Firewall?

Krishna Dagli writes to mention a post by Bruce Schneier on his site indicating that the U.S. Navy may be patenting the Firewall. Whether or not it is their intention to do so is unclear. From the patent description: "In a communication system having a plurality of networks, a method of achieving network separation between first and second networks is described. First and second networks with respective first and second degrees of trust are defined, the first degree of trust being higher than the second degree of trust. Communication between the first and second networks is enabled via a network interface system having a protocol stack, the protocol stack implemented by the network interface system in an application layer."

Comments

The Military Gets Patents?

[Greyfox]

I would think that they don't really have a business purpose to do so since they don't sell a product and if anyone tried to sue the military over a patent the Government would just sieze the patent as being "vital to national security" or some such (I seem to recall that they can do that.)

Maybe it's a sad attempt to prove that they're on the cutting edge of technology by patenting some newfangled idea that the rest of us have been using for years? I guess they probably have some catching up to do since EDS has been "working" on their IT infrastructure for years (That's why their stock price fell by half and never recovered don't you know? Well that and lying about the revenues that were coming in from it...)

Might not be a bad thing?

[Kadin2048]

Actually most of the time, the government does not seize patents. Not that they don't have the ability to, or that perhaps they don't just go ahead and infringe on them sometimes, but the military spends a lot of money buying stuff from contractors/vendors every year, because the vendor has a patent on stuff. If we were in the middle of World War III, the situation might be slightly different.

So if someone in the Navy really did have a novel idea, it's not hard to imagine that they might want to get it patented, just as a defensive measure.

My big question is: if the government patents something, wouldn't the invention automatically be in the public domain, provided that it wasn't classified? Normally all products produced by government employees in the course of their jobs are in the public domain, so I would think that a patent held by the Navy would be impossible to use aggressively.

In that situation -- assuming that's true, and the Navy can't collect royalties -- then having the Navy (or other government agencies) patent stuff might be a very good idea. For the small taxpayer expense that it takes to file and maintain the patent, the country might be saved millions of dollars a year of royalties and litigation costs.