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

1994-09-15 - Re: RC4 compatibility testing

Header Data

From: “Perry E. Metzger” <perry@imsi.com>
To: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Message Hash: 2e300fe922912d24eb105aab4dc591aab547a67612c4052cc55584005fa56c2b
Message ID: <9409151556.AA04764@snark.imsi.com>
Reply To: <199409151526.IAA01380@jobe.shell.portal.com>
UTC Datetime: 1994-09-15 15:56:58 UTC
Raw Date: Thu, 15 Sep 94 08:56:58 PDT

Raw message

From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Sep 94 08:56:58 PDT
To: Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com>
Subject: Re: RC4 compatibility testing
In-Reply-To: <199409151526.IAA01380@jobe.shell.portal.com>
Message-ID: <9409151556.AA04764@snark.imsi.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Hal says:
> "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com> writes:
> 
> >A "submarine" patent application would have been made before the
> >public use.
> 
> I'm not familiar with this term, "submarine" patent application.

Basically, what you do is use administrative tricks to delay the
patent from being issued for as many years as possible -- sometimes
decades -- while the idea becomes popular and gets incorporated into
lots of products. Patent applications in the U.S. are kept secret by
law. Then, the patent finally gets granted -- resulting in lots of
people suddenly finding that the product they've been building for
many years is now patented by someone -- retroactively making them
liable for fat juicy license fees.

Another trick is to have the patent delayed by a secrecy order...

Perry

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