From: henry strickland <strick@versant.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 93 11:13:35 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: on initial rejection of claims of RSA patent
Message-ID: <9312071846.AA17866@osc.versant.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Diffie, via "L.":

#     No.  But after all, the RSA patent was filed from MIT by people
# (R, S, and A) that I didn't know well till much later.  There may have
# been some hankey pankey I didn't know about, but I certainly don't
# recall the New York Times article you refer to.  The statement that
# ``They just got the application back rejected.''  Doesn't sound right
# to me.  I presume that the Patent Office has to state why an
# application is returned.  It's decisions, after all, are a constant

All four of the PKP patents mentioned in RFC1423,

      Cryptographic Apparatus and Method
      ("Diffie-Hellman")............................... No. 4,200,770

      Public Key Cryptographic Apparatus
      and Method ("Hellman-Merkle").................... No. 4,218,582

      Cryptographic Communications System and
      Method ("RSA")................................... No. 4,405,829

      Exponential Cryptographic Apparatus
      and Method ("Hellman-Pohlig").................... No. 4,424,414


had all of their claims either "rejected" or "objected to" on the first
pass by the patent examiner.  I have been told this is not unusual.
The patent examiner gave reasonable technical reasons whe he rejected
them.  Nothing looks fishy to me, that is part of the record.   

I have a copy of [almost all of] the "full wrappers" on these four
patents, and am making them available to the CA cypherpunks (CA,
because I live here).  (They're not online, there's a lot of
handwritten pages & annotations & forms that would not OCR, and it's a
6" stack of legal paper, so it's not easy for me to provide them
online, sorry.)

					strick