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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

Do unallied countries respect patents for military hardware?

Probably not, but also my personal experience says that you can't really replicate things just always from the patent. There's always some secret sauce to get things to work. The question is what exactly did Loon sell when they shut down and where did most of the people working on it end up? I know some folks at Loon and they went back to either Google Brain or some other moonshots in Google or Google Research but a lot of people didn't do that.

If you need secret sauce to get things to work, you can have the patent invalidated.

Tell that to the pharmaceutical industry. Many pharmaceutical patents can't be reproduced without insider knowledge as discovered companies that entered the "generic" business.

https://dlj.law.duke.edu/article/patent-laws-reproducibility...

You're very wrong about that.

What you're talking about is called a 112 rejection. Section 112 has to do with "written description," "enablement," and "best mode."

Getting a patent invalidated after it's issued can't be done on 112 grounds. It's done based on anticipation and obviousness (prior art, basically).

I was referring to how things work in my non-US locale, unclear patent specifications are grounds for having a patent revoked.

Which country is that?

Singapore

OK. I don't know how common it is to have a Singaporean patent.

Lawyers who worked in chemical and medical patents confirmed this for me when I was in Google Legal. Don't even get me started about software patents.

The legal fiction is that a "reasonable amount of experimentation" may be required, beyond what's in the patent. The notion is that a lab tech determines the exact concentrations, temps, and pressure to get the thing to work.

Of course this is abused.

Why would anyone respect patents for military hardware? It's for war, where's the respect in that?

That was my point, he seemed to be suggesting something almost like espionage if the patents had been sold to someone in contact with China or something, but the patents are already public and I don't think would be respected for this application.

He could have argued they maybe should have originally been covered by https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act to begin with maybe.

Many Chinese equipment does look like a copy of Western equipment. I don't think China respect patents at all. And I think even allied countries wouldn't respect patents with military applications if in their interest.

e.g. "How Turkey Defied the U.S. and Became a Killer Drone Power" https://theintercept.com/2019/05/14/turkey-second-drone-age/

No-one respects patents for military purposes.

That's why important stuff is kept secret.

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