Why the US Government Has 5,915 Secret, Classified Patents

Transcript

This video was made possible by Dashlane. Get a safer, simpler life online at Dashlane.com/HAI. 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. Edible phones, robot friends, a pair of low-cut ankle socks where the sock doesn’t come off your heel when you walk around, or maybe even a method for transitioning seamlessly to sponsorship reads.

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