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Arise, you have nothing to lose but your barbed wire fences!

1994-06-03 - Re: more info from talk at MIT yesterday.

Header Data

From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@imsi.com>
To: sommerfeld@localhost.medford.ma.us (Bill Sommerfeld)
Message Hash: 0d3fd601623a6aec6b974e01d8a6950e84dfd440684316e6b30ba5f54462ea63
Message ID: <9406031436.AA04161@snark.imsi.com>
Reply To: <199406031357.JAA00376@localhost>
UTC Datetime: 1994-06-03 14:37:37 UTC
Raw Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 07:37:37 PDT

Raw message

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Jun 94 07:37:37 PDT
To: sommerfeld@localhost.medford.ma.us (Bill Sommerfeld)
Subject: Re: more info from talk at MIT yesterday.
In-Reply-To: <199406031357.JAA00376@localhost>
Message-ID: <9406031436.AA04161@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Bill Sommerfeld says:
> They also confirmed Tom Knight's suspicions about what they're going
> to do when someone reverse engineers the chip and publishes the
> Skipjack algorithm & the family key: they've got a patent application
> filed, under a secrecy order; if the algorithm is published, they'll
> lift the secrecy order and have the patent issued, and use that to go
> after anyone making a compatible version.

Since when can the government patent its work? I thought that works
produced by government agencies could not be copyrighted or patented.

In any case, they cannot refuse to license a patent, so this isn't
real protection anyway. (The hope behind people patenting things they
may release in the future is to make it commercially less attractive,
not to utterly prevent use.)

Perry

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