U.S. patent office censoring?

[Polverone]

Earlier today I was looking up information on ricin. The Merck Index told me that US patent 3,060,165 had instructions for the preparation of ricin. I went to uspto.gov and entered the patent number. The patent was found but of course it is an older patent so only images were available. When I clicked on images, an image appeared saying "Patent Not Found. Please click on the Full Text button to return to the full text page."

Fortunately, I was able to get the patent from espacenet.net. But I find it a little alarming that this patent is now "Not Found" on the US Patent Office's own site. This is the first time I have ever encountered this error. If you find patents for interesting but potentially dangerous things, save them. Who knows how long they will remain publicly available.

[Arkangel]

I recently looked up the patent for VX and the same thing had happened. No record found.

[MrSamosa]

Maybe we should start saving/downloading/copying patents ASAP, so that we can still have a patent library to use for research.

[Polverone]

No doubt it is a good idea to download things anyway, but there's something curious: Arkangel wasn't able to view the US VX patent (3,911,059 is the one you were seeking, I presume) but I was able to access it without difficulty today. I am starting to wonder if simple technical difficulties rather than shadowy censors account for the missing ricin patent. Still, I would be very interested if others discover that some patents have disappeared.

[darkdontay]

They must have recently hired some one with atleast a 3rd grade education. Someone that realized Hey we are burrning books, pulling them off shelves ARRESTING PEOPLE FOR JUST OWNING THEM, maybe it is not a good idea that some kid could be arrested for blowing up a building and when in the eventual interigation it came out they everthing he need to learn was oin the internet. Yea Ah Ha the Intrenet, that dark evil cesspool of vermin , and on what heidous demonic satnaic site did you learn this billy? "Hey on the Us Goverment Patents website, obvcourse". I would love to see how many times you have FBI agents type in KEYWORDS about making explosives and get links to the US Patent Office.

[MrSamosa]

I believe that this is little more than technical difficulties. I accessed the VX Patent without any problems yesterday. I have not tried the Ricin patent, though. I was also able to view the CS-related patents, so I don't think the USPTO is making an effort to censor Chemical Agent related patents. However, I still don't think that it would be unreasonable to say that they may do just this in the future.

[Arthis]

I agree that we should sometime save files: I personnally do often as my poor connection costs me money and I prefer reading the whole page offline (unless I'm at the school, with some adsl at less).

But when they start censuring it may be a bit late: I was thinking about this organism that saves "the whole" internet, which has saved several terabytes of files ? It would be an idea, though asking them the patent on sarin may be alarming <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

[Spudkilla]

The Ricin patent didn't work for me, but the VX one did. It might be a technical error, and chances are it probably is. I doubt that they would censor patents, because nobody really knows of the patent database on the internet.

What is the chance of some punk 11 year old finding the Ricin patent (feat no. 1), understading the Ricin patent (major feat no. 1) finding the chemicals for Ricin (feat no. 2), and the assimilating the data, following the procedure, and actually synthesizing Ricin (major feat no. 2)? Probably some big number to a very tiny number, but I don't feel like making one up. I see no reason why the government would censor patents.

[NightStalker]

I got the VX patent, but the ricin one is MIA. I'd bet even money that it went missing right after those ragheads in england got busted with it and the media had all that hoopla about how easy it was to make.

I'm sure NBK has a copy of it, and every other CW patent, that he'll be including in his PDF.

[darkdontay]

I would be weary of disinformation. The goverment is not as dumb as its low lackies, the upper echoleon get what is going on. If something is that powerful why would you release the information on it?

[megalomania]

If the future brings censorship of the patent database then it will also bring copyright violations charges, uising the DMCA, against archive sites. There is already a section on the FTP for patent PDF files, I suggest upload everything they get and download everything they look at. When the US patent database dissappears it will be sorely missed. Hopefully we can ease the burden by hoarding all the good documentation in preperation for this black day.

[Microtek]

I am pretty sure the missing patents are technical errors or bandwidth errors; it has happened quite a few times that I can't get access to the site or can't get access to some patents on the site, especially a times of ( presumed ) heavy use.
Having said that, one way they certainly have limited the usefulness of the site is to disable the keyword search function for the older patents; if you want to find a patent from before 1976 you need to know the number or classification.

[Arkangel]

Searched again, and got this:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Full text is not available for this patent. Click on "Images" button above to view full patent.

United States Patent 3,911,059

Current U.S. Class: 558/88; 558/95; 558/118; 558/123; 987/159

[Chade]

The ricin patent is available on espacenet. It's not available as text simply because it's very old and they don't bother to OCR the older patents. This means you'll have to view each page as a pdf image (the document is three pages long) and read/print them like that.

Espacenet have never pulled a patent off their database for security reasons as far as I'm aware. I can't say for sure, but I don't think the US patent office does either. If a patent is of military significance, the patent offices will just assign it a number, but the original paper document will just be blank with a note to say that it's classified. That means, if you wanted one of these classified patents and went down to the patent office itself, there wouldn't even be a copy there.

Having said that, the occasions when a patent is classified as being militarily significant are extremely rare, and I've only heard of a handful of cases several years ago now, all of which were US documents. As you can appreciate, if something is a state secret, a patent is generally pointless, as no-one is meant to know about it anyway.

[Jacks Complete]

One further clarification.

The Patent Office send anything that they even suspect might be a national security issue to the MOD (in the UK) and they choose whether or not to censor it or otherwise restrict it.

There are actually quite a lot of them. Big companies (arms companies) have to send all this stuff to the MOD plod before they file it anyway, but smaller inventors don't know this, so it gets checked.

If you want an example, try looking for the patent for Chobham armour. I bet you won't find it, as it is the current state-of-the-art (passive) armour on tanks. What you might find is a cut down version of it, though, which doesn't let you actually replicate it, but gives you an idea.