Can the Pentagon Protect Intellectual Property Rights?
The military services will keep struggling with the “interoperability” of their weapon systems unless the Pentagon can figure out how to deal with the intellectual property rights of defense contractors, said Marine Lt. Gen. James Cartwright, Joint Staff director for force structure, resources and assessment.
The Pentagon’s “network-centric” model for future warfare is incompatible with the need for companies to protect their technologies from piracy, Cartwright told a conference of the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.
The so-called “Napster” debate over the property rights of recording artists is a comparable situation to what the Defense Department faces today, he said. “I am watching very closely the music industry, with great interest.”
The Pentagon ideally would like to tell defense contractors to hand over their applications and algorithms, so the services could employ the same technology Defense Department-wide, Cartwright said. But that is not possible today. “The policy, the law, isn’t quite right yet.”
Ultimately, “I think you have to get at that issue culturally. How do you protect and give value to what industry will provide in this very fuzed environment?”
In years past, he said, the push has been to eliminate military specifications in the development of software. The problem is that, “in the direction we are heading, specs will be minor in comparison to the demands that we will put on systems for interoperability, the demands we will put on industry for interoperability. … It appears that industry is heading in a direction that is going to answer those questions before we have to.”
nationaldefensemagazine.org |
