The Rush To Patent the Atomic Bomb

dooling writes "In case you were thinking of building your own atom bomb, you may want to weigh your intellectual property liability. It seems there are over 2000 patents covering the atom bomb. To avoid publishing the patents, a central tenet of the patent system, "the project made use of an obscure law whereby patent applications could be filed but no one would actually look at them or evaluate them. They would just be stamped secret and stored in a vault at the patent office." The irony here is that while all the patents were essentially stored in the same place at the patent office and written to be understandable by any engineer, the Manhattan Project worked diligently to compartmentalize knowledge, using code names for just about all aspects of the project and keeping tight security on all information. It seems the patents were filed to give the U.S. government an essential monopoly on the burgeoning nuclear industry and protect it against others who might patent similar technologies later."

Comments

Well...

[Chairboy]

If I'm building an atomic bomb, the threat of being hit by a patent lawsuit seems somewhat lower than, say, the threat of being bombed into a metaphor.

Plus, this is just the patent office. Now if the _IRS_ were involved...

Mutually Assured Patent Destruction

[Doc Ruby]

If I've got an atomic bomb, I'm not going to pay any attention to your patent lawsuit.

As should be pretty obvious from all the other people who got atomic bombs.

Obvious to anyone, except evidently the retarded capitalists, lawyers or bureaucrats who shared the most secret and dangerous info in the world with an office whose primary mission is publishing technical info, for no use whatsoever except increasing the risk of proliferating the weapons.

Patent dementia. The kind of thing communists mean when they say "capitalists will sell the rope for the nooses to hang them".