Since Government exists for the public good, it should already be incentivized to produce research. Patenting that research so that people can't utilize it defeats the whole point.
What am I missing?
Governments don't necessarily have to treat patents the same way as private companies do, either. Legislation can require a fairly open licensing scheme for reasonable rates, for example, which balances recouping expense with making the publicly-funded work publicly available.
You don’t need a patent system to incentivize research, people and companies can just treat new inventions as trade secrets and never tell anyone how they work. Plenty of tech companies already do this. Google has not filed patents disclosing exactly how their search system works, for example.
The U.S. military has an additional tool to protect knowledge: classification. Again, there is no patent on public file for a functioning hydrogen fusion bomb.
So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
That's its (stated) purpose from the viewpoint of society. Patents' purposes from the viewpoint of the inventor is to secure the 20-year monopoly on the invention (or to secure a plausible threat). Nobody would file a patent for the sole purpose of disclosure. If you really want to disclose something, there are a million easier, better, and cheaper ways to do it.
>So why would the Navy file a patent on something? It is plausible that their goal in doing so was to disclose its existence.
If they wanted disclosure, they could just post it on their website and issue a press release. Or publish a book. Or a journal article. Or add it to their podcast. They already do all these things. Why not for this?
I am still a little surprised that they are allowed to keep secrets, for the same reason.
A trade secret does.
A patent doesn't.
Yes, it can.
US-government created works are automatically public domain in the US, but the government, IIRC, still holds international copyrights on them, and moreover can own (even American) copyrights on anything whose creation makes it subject to copyright.
suppose the government spends a large amount of public funds on research that turns out to have a very narrow commercial application. if the findings can be freely used by a couple niche companies, it's effectively a subsidy to them. not necessarily a bad thing, but we might want the government to be more intentional about granting subsidies. if instead the companies have to negotiate a license, the government can recoup some of the public's money and allocate it to more research.