The Military’s Insistence on Owning Commercial Intellectual Property is Limiting Innovation
Summary
In the age of advanced software and AI, the U.S. government is coming to rely more on the procurement of dual-use commercial technology to give the armed forces a strategic, operational, and tactical edge. Based on our experience, we believe that for the Department of Defense to vastly improve the speed and scale with which it acquires and fields emerging technology, it should rethink its current approach to intellectual property ownership. It is critical that the Department of Defense be able to own and access its data for many reasons, including preparedness and the execution of war, the sustainment and improvement of existing capability, senior leader decision support, and more. As a former special advisor to the secretary of the Air Force, Tim Grayson, said about software solutions from traditional defense contractors: “When we have worked interoperability at the data level what we have found is the biggest problem is legacy programs and their vendors don’t know their own systems. Over the past several years, the U.S. government has begun to wield new authorities, like the modular open systems approach, to avoid vendor lock and improve interoperability (perhaps an implicit acknowledgment that aggressive data rights are not yielding desired outcomes).