Many have questioned the US Army’s right to use a recently announced camouflage pattern, so a few weeks ago we decided to put it to bed and asked the Army about it. They offered us a rather curt, but confident, answer. But then DLA began a quest to fund a new printer that didn’t pay commercial printing royalties to Crye Precision for Scorpion. So last week, we ran a story regarding the US Army’s statement that they had “Appropriate rights to use the Operational Camouflage Pattern” and, in the process, exposed a major controversy that had arisen over printing royalties for OCP.
The US Army uses the name Operational Camouflage Pattern to refer to the Scorpion W2 camouflage pattern which is a 2010 modification of the so-called Scorpion pattern originally introduced by Crye Precision in 2001 and patented in 2004. What is at question, is whether or not the Army can use the pattern, royalty-free.
We know that Crye filed for, and was granted, a patent for this camouflage by the US Patent and Trademark Office, Camouflage Pattern Applied to Substrate US D487,848 S, March 30, 2004. We also know that not long after the patent was granted, the Army asked the PTO to insert the following addendum into the patent:
After claim, insert the following:
–Statement as to rights to inventions made under federally sponsored research and development.
The U.S. Government has a paid-up license in this invention and the right in limited circumstances to require the patent owner to license others on reasonable terms as provided for by the terms of contract No. DAAD16-01-C-0061 awarded by the US Army Robert Morris Acquisition Natick Contracting Division of the United States Department of Defense.–
From this, we surmised that the US Army’s assertion of appropriate rights is based on the funding of the Scorpion project via contract (DAAD16-01-C-0061) in September of 2001. This 13 year-old contract has remained the missing piece to this puzzle. Does this contract, in fact, prefer rights to the camouflage to the US Army?
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