Small businesses claim US government stealing their ideas
By Eric Shawn Published December 17, 2013
“They stole all my stuff and used taxpayer money to do it,” John Hnatio, a Maryland small business owner, says of the U.S. government.
Hnatio claims the government has put his company, FoodquestTQ, nearly out of business by stealing his firm’s software that was designed to be licensed to the Food and Drug Administration to monitor food safety.
The FDA “took our ideas, plagiarized my doctoral dissertation on which a patent was based, and then they infringed on our patent. The result was that it decimated our business,” he adds.
Hnatio says his company has been left hanging by a thread. He has had to fire employees and says that the remaining three, including himself, are receiving no salary and have been forced to go on unemployment insurance.
“I have never seen anything like it,” says Hnatio, who is a retired federal government official. He says the FDA “duplicated exactly what we were selling to industry and they were giving it away for free…instead of helping small business commercialize their product, what we are seeing is a dragon, in the name of the U.S. government that is eating their own young.”
FoodquestTQ is only one of numerous small businesses that accuse the government of stealing their intellectual property or trade secrets when they enter into contracts or research agreements with federal agencies.
“The government interceded, stole the technology and attempted to use this in classified programs,” says Jim O’Keefe, the president of the small New Jersey technology company Demodulation. He has filed a $50 million lawsuit against the U.S. government, accusing it of taking his firm’s research.
Demodulation developed an advanced technology involving fiber coated wire, called microwire, which is thinner than a human hair. The company says its microwire can be used for a variety of national security applications, such as tracking drones, keeping tabs on soldiers on battlefields, transmitting information without a power
source, and that it even has the ability “to render objects invisible to radar.”
“It sounds incredible and impossible that the U.S. government is taking things from people,” says Demodulation lawyer Sean Callagy. “We believe this is the greatest country in the world with the greatest justice system in the world but the U.S. government is not an eagle or a flag, but human beings. And human beings make
mistakes.”
The lawsuit accuses the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration, among others, of illegally swiping the firm’s information by “using microwire and Demodulation’s trade secrets in its mission to gather intelligence.”
It also says that the U.S. has even built “a secure facility for the production of microwire” on its own. “There are classified reports showing the technology,” declares Demodulation attorney Ben Light, who says that after the company “shared the secret sauce” about microwire with federal officials, they simply “took (the) wire.”
The Department of Energy referred Fox News’ requests for comment to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which did not respond to repeated requests for a comment about the company’s allegations.
The Department of Justice denies Demodulation’s charges in court filings.
Stuart Delery, an Acting Assistant Attorney General, wrote that while “the United States admits that it continues to conduct research regarding what is generally known as ‘microwire,” he says that the government did not act improperly.
The Department of Justice claims the government did not take any proprietary information or develop the microwire technology based on Demodulation’s work, and that “none of the asserted patents have been infringed on by the United States.”
Delery also pointed out that some of Demodulation’s patents had expired. “The only reason the patents expired is because Demodulation was driven out of business,” responds the firm’s lawyer, Light. “It doesn’t affect the entire case because any infringement during the period when the patents were enforced is still compensable.”
O’Keefe says the government denials are “an impossibility based on the evidence I have.”
He is calling for “reform and legislation to protect us. I hope through our litigation we will be able to expose some of the problems.”
It turns out that the government is routinely accused of similar wrongdoing and sometimes has to pony up.
The U.S. Army settled a case in November by paying $50 million to a Texas company, Apptricity, which claimed the government took some of its software, which tracks military equipment from MRE’s to troops, without paying for it.
The company’s court papers said that the government “willfully infringed” on its copyrights, “failed to provide information” about what it did and was engaged in “actively concealing the Army’s misappropriation of Apptricity software.”
The complaint said the Army paid for using the software on five servers and 150 devices, but actually “copied and installed Apptricity software on at least 98 servers and at least 9,063 devices” without telling the company.
“I do