Invention Secrecy Act
The Invention Secret Act allows the United States government to classify ideas and patents under "Secrecy Orders", which indefinitely restrict public knowledge of them.
[5] The United States Patent and Trademark Office has investigated the possibility of restricting new technologies if those new ideas may be disruptive to existing industries.
[7] The Invention Secrecy Act has been criticized for lack of oversight and impacts on future scientific research by inventors, industry, attorneys and academics.
[1][5][7][8] The United States government has long sought to control the release of new technologies that might threaten the national defense and economic stability of the country.
Secrecy Orders were initially intended to remain effective for two years, beginning on July 1, 1940, but were later extended for the duration of the second World War.
[13] Each year, tens of thousands of inventions and patent applications are reviewed by hand to decide if they should be allowed to be published or should be hidden from the public.
[7] Attempts through 2020 to expand the scope of the Invention Secrecy Act in Congress were unsuccessful, attributed to lobbying from groups such as the American Bar Association.
[2] The second option is that the government may simply do nothing, which allows the creators of the idea and invention to pursue it fully in United States and foreign markets.
[2] The creators are then forbidden from sharing, disclosing, discussing, developing, selling or marketing the ideas within the United States or in foreign nations.
[17] James Constant of California was restricted by Secrecy Order from 1969 to 1971 for his advancements in radar systems to track objects ranging from shipping containers to parts on an industrial assembly line, and later in 1982 was denied any damages by courts.
[19] Husband and wife inventors Budimir and Desanka Damnjanovic developed a method for "spraying liquid from the back of an airplane", intended to be a patent for an anti-heat-seeking missile technology system.
[20] The Federal Bureau of Investigation responded with visits to their home, to warn them against any disclosures of the technologies, per their attorney Hattem Beydoun and court filings.
[20] In 2014, the Damnjanovics filed a lawsuit against the Air Force and the Department of Defense to lift two unique Secrecy Orders, claiming violations of the First and the Fifth Amendments of the Constitution of the United States.
[8] Other studies have shown that being forced secret for a scale of months can cause an invention or idea to be 15% less likely to be cited by later research and development, demonstrating that even a limited restriction has negative impacts for inventors and the sciences.
[7] James W. Parrett Jr. of the William & Mary Law School has argued that the Invention Secrecy Act can have value for certain areas such as around biotechnology patents, due to their novel and often still unexplored nature.
[24] The high-level categories of inventions from each year which can be forcibly classified are listed in the following table, and each section includes an expansive spectrum of topics beneath each: This article incorporates public domain material from websites or documents of the United States Government.
