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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Monday, April 16, 2007Beware of Floods of Secrecy Orders In a Bleak Future.The German Home Secretary, Mr. Wolfgang Schäuble, has recently argued in public [in German only, sorry] that any distinction between the external security of the state (i.e. the question of peace and war), on the one hand, and the internal security of the state (i.e. the question of justice and law enforcement), on the other hand, should be deemed obsolete in the age of terrorism. I wont't buy any of such approaches; they appear to be quite excessive and even explicitly dangerous for our democracy over here.Why do I mention this on a Blog on Intellectual Property? Well, some time ago (in 2003, to be precise) I had published  this posting on patents, state secrets, and the threat of terrorism, reporting on some strange Gedankenexperiment undertaken by a retired ministerial official to extend the potential scope of secrecy orders to patents. That man had mooted to provide a regulation within the German Patent Act giving a basis for issuing secrecy orders if the public disclosure of a patent application would create a danger to the external or internal security of the Federal Republic of Germany. If such thinking should prevail, expect a flood of secrecy orders covering almost every ambivalent patent application that might, perhaps merely under some remote circumstances, be used within a certain context the Government considers to be critical for internal security. In such a scenario, will, say, cryptography-related patent applications or other broadly used interesting technologies be locked away from the general public? Moreover, the European Patent Office is not entitled to deal with secret inventions. Issuing more secrecy orders would in the effect strengthen national patent offices at the expense of the EPO. One of the noblest functions of the patent system, the broad dissemination of technical knowledge, is already hampered by scaling problems due to the explosion in application numbers during past decades. However, this problem can - at least in my personal view - be overcome by utilising more good ICT. Significantly broadening the legal basis for issuing secrecy orders might be a coffin nail for the benefits of the patent system in society. The problems caused by such bad politics cannot be overcome by any technical means. They should be avoided by helping to vote down such misguided approaches as currently under debate. Technorati Tags: Patents
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