Dan Gillmor publishes an e-mail from Bruce Schneier complaining about censorship of the American Patent Office database.
Apparently, users of that database have lost the ability to further their valuable research on how to use ricin as a weapon of mass destruction. Requesting the patent in question returns only an error message.
This is not censorship. The government doesn't tell anybody else to shut up in this case. They are only holding information back that they have. And they do so in many other cases as well. Is it "censorship" if there are no instruction manuals for making weapons of mass destruction on the Pentagon website?
On the other hand, Axel H. Horns might be right in commenting that the basic social contract behind the patent system is granting a temporary monopoly in exchange for public information. That would mean that the very fundaments of the patent system require that every lunatic on the planet is served by the Patent Office with information about how to use ricin for the next large scale attack.
That in turn would seem to lead to an excellent argument for wholesale abolition of the patent system, if anybody should get inclined to call for such abolition, for example as a reaction to the mess caused by software patents.
"Look! The patent office is helping terrorists to develop their WMD ability! And we can't even stop that without compromising the basic social contract the patent system is built on."
This is a strong argument. I am personally very much interested in preserving a free Internet. However, I draw a line at pages describing technology to build weapons of mass destruction. Leaving this information freely available can kill people. The level of damage possibly arising from that is extremely high.
I'll be happy to come back to this case if I ever feel that there is no other hope left than calling for abolition.
And, by the way, if the patent in question can still be found in foreign databases, that only proves that it needs to be removed from those immediately as well.
There is some background on the patent at this article (via Ernest Miller).
Update: Axel H. Horns kindly reacts to my comment here. I have nothing much more to add to my above post. However, since Horns stressed the fact that I am on the FFII advisory board, I would just like to clarify that the views expressed above are in no way to be imputed to the FFII, being only my own. If anything, they run against the basic idea of a "Free Information Infrastructure".
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 13, 2004 06:37 PM | TrackBackI think there are two issues:
1. Restricting the availability of this patent (and similar ones) from the USPTO's database doesn't make much of a difference - it is still available from foreign databases and plenty of other sources.
2. Wouldn't it be cooler if the government were *clever* instead? Before the controversy, the referrer logs of whoever was looking for this patent or others like it might have been very interesting. By shutting down this channel they lose out on some of that potential information about terrorist planning.
Posted by: Ravi Nanavati on March 14, 2004 02:52 PMI addressed the former issue in my last sentence. If the information is available elsewhere, that only means it needs to be taken down there immediately as well.
I agree with the latter issue. I have addressed it in commenting a paper of Jonathan Zittrain in this earlier post here.
Posted by: Karl-Friedrich Lenz on March 14, 2004 05:34 PMI guess I don't think it is practical or a good use of resources to get into a game of whack-a-mole with respect to patents related to WMD. One might as well try to censor information about mustard gas or smallpox because terrorists find it useful. The information has been out there, in public, for too long now and the collateral damage of this sort of censorship is not worth any marginal terrorism-prevention benefit, in my opinion.
Posted by: Ravi Nanavati on March 15, 2004 06:04 AM