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BLOG@IP::JURPatent Attorney Axel H Horns' Blog on Intellectual Property Law.
Wednesday, September 05, 2007Mr Franco Frattini and Technical Teachings on the Internet.Mr Franco Frattini, European Commissioner responsible for Justice, Freedom and Security, talking about EU counter-terrorism strategy in the European Parliament on September 05, 2007:"[...] This brings me to the Internet and the way this tool, which has brought amazing advantages to our world, is being misused by terrorists. We all know that terrorists enjoy the benefits of the internet just as much - or even more so - as ordinary citizens, for instance to plan their attacks or to disseminate messages of concrete incitement to commit terror attacks.Well, making the publication of detailed instructions on all kinds of terrorist tactics, including the production of explosives on the Internet punishable - what could that mean for the patent people? Of course, a lot of patented recipes for explosives are available on-line in the various on-line patent document repositories within the appropriate IPC classes. And, surely, a lot of other technical teachings disclosed in Millions of patent documents not related to explosives potentially could also be misused by terrorists (and, of course, also by other criminals) for a broad spectrum of illegitimate purposes. There should be no illusions about the perils for an open and effective patent system lurking behind such political language as just today used by Mr Franco Frattini. The economic well-being of our today's European societies is based on the free access unhampered by regulations to - speaking in patent jargon - a broad spectrum of technical teachings. And, sadly to say but inherently true, virtually all of these technical teachings are more or less of something like a dual-use nature: They can be used for legitimate purposes, on the one hand, and they can also in one or the other form be misused for a bunch of illegitimate ends, including terrorism, on the other hand. Politicians like Mr Franco Frattini should think twice before mooting serious restrictions of technology-related information on the Internet. Just taking down a few obscure websites offering bomb-making recipes might soon turn out to be no more than a populist scam to calm down uninformed members of the public. It would under no circumstances stop terrorists from gaining technology-related knowledge for their criminal purposes. Effective measures to control dissemination of such dual-use technology open to potential misuse would, inter alia, require heavy censorship not only on the Internet and on patent documents but also on all paper-based technical magazines, student textbooks, and a vast range of research papers. The result would be something that looks very very different compared to our free western societies all politicians pretend to defend; it would in fact mean no less than to install some kind of capsuled priesthood of technology experts segregated from the rest of the society. Students in technology disciplines would, under such policy, be required to obtain a security clearance before being allowed to matriculate; it might be worth to take notice of the fact that some of the 9/11 pilots had been enroled as students at Hamburg University before. Forget anything like plannings based on the Lisbon Agenda under such circumstances.Rigorously extending the legal basis for issuing secrecy orders has already been mooted since more than four years; see  my earlier posting and my commentary on German Home Secretary, Mr. Wolfgang Schäuble, recently arguing in public 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.Technorati Tags:  Patents
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