Well again it&#x27;s a completely different story, this isn&#x27;t unique to the NSA, and not unique to the USA.<p>And heck universities getting patents for research funded by public funds, conducted by students which are supported by public grants isn&#x27;t any different, one might say is actually worse.
And you also forget that many companies will use public grants, as well as tax credit for R&amp;D, governments have quite a big reason to provide incentives for private companies using public funds because the more you spend on R&amp;D usually the better your economy and society will be in the long run.<p>There is nothing in the law that prevents the US government from filing patents, there&#x27;s nothing in the law of most countries to prevent government agencies &#x2F; government owned organizations for filing patents (before the royal postal service was &quot;privatized&quot; it was the largest patent holder in the UK while being a government agency they sold off most of their patents when they were privatized, same goes for British Rail, and British Telecom).<p>If you want something worse then well most medical patents today are more or less publicly funded, drug companies are often paid by the government to find drugs which then they can later patent, heck if they are doing it &quot;right&quot; then they it&#x27;s also likely that they&#x27;ll use a public university to do the research for them while maintaining the filing rights for any patents for true double dipping into your pocket.