From: dlv@bwalk.dm.com (Dr. Dimitri Vulis)
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 95 10:04:05 PDT
To: cypherpunks@toad.com (Cypherpunks Mailing List)
Subject: Re: Patents and trade secrets was: Encryption algorithms used in
In-Reply-To: <9509250357.AA21926@cs.umass.edu>
Message-ID: <0THZBD10w165w@bwalk.dm.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Some unknown person writes:
>> It just moves the prior art date from the date of invention to the date
>> of filing the patent application.

>What happens if the chronology goes like this ?
>
>(0) Alice invents a snaffleblort.
>(1) Bob invents a snaffleblort.
>(2) Bob files for a patent on a snaffleblort.
>
>From what you said, it would appear that Alice's prior art won't count when

>it comes to considering the validity of Bob's patent claim. Is that correct?

The bizarre history of the invention of radio comes to my mind. Perhaps we can
learn something from it. The Russian Alexander Popov taught for 18 years at a
naval school in Kronstadt (near St Petersburg, Russia). He was fascinated by
Hertz's 1888 paper on electromagnetic waves and worked with his students on
improving his results. In 1889 Russian Navy granted him funds to investigate
the use of electromagnetic waves for telecommunications. It's undisputed that
Popov invented the antenna in 1894, and built a (subsequently widely used)
apparatus for advance warning of thunderstroms in 1995. Now the disputed part:
Popov published his paper _Pribor dlja obnaruzhenija i registrirovanija
elektrichiskikh kolebanij_ in the January 1896 issue of _Zhurnal Russkogo
Fiziko-Khimicheskogo Obshchestva_. In it he described the first radio
receiver. On May 7, 1895 and March 12, 1896 Popv made public presentations to
the Russian Physico-Chemical Society demonstrating his invention and (in March
1896) transmitted the words "Heinrich Hertz" (in a Morse-like code) at a
distance of 250 meters.

In June 1896 Gulielmo Marconi filed for a patent in England. He offered to the
British government his inventions for wireless transmission of signals, whose
details he kept secret. The news of his application and the description of his
invention weren't made public until June 1897, when the patent was granted, at
which point Popov raised hell and wrote letters to numerous newspapers,
claiming that Marconi's patent application was substantially identical to
Popov's publications. Meanwhile, Popov continued working on his transmitters/
detectors; by the spring of 1897 he was transmitting at 640m. He got more
funds and built 5km equipment by the summer of 1897. In 1900 he installed a
production radio-telegraph system between several islands in the Gulf of
Finland 50 km apart. After the Marconi incident, Russians viewed radio
transmissions technology as a military secret and didn't publish these results
until many years later, although comparable technology was available
commercially in the West. Popov was always low on funds. Marconi, a brilliant
entrepreneur, sold stock in his corporation, raised capital, hired other
prominent scientists to work with him, and was developing new technologies
much faster.

In 1901 Marconi was transmitting radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean, and
Popov retired from the naval school and went to teach at the SPB electro-
technical institute; he was soon elected its president. In 1904, before the
beginning of Russo-Japanese war, the Russians had to buy in great hurry a
large quantity of radio receivers/transmitters - made commercially in Germany
under Marconi's patent. Popov, no longer with the Navy, got to supervise their
installation in Russian naval ships. (Russia lost that war pretty miserably,
by the way.)

What, you might ask, is the cryptographic relevance of all this? Well, in 1914
Russia was waging war against Germany. Russian military officers in East
Prussia relied on radio to transmit information. Russians knew about crypto,
but the key distribution was so screwed up that most on their transmissions
were in cleartext. (Besides, radio was supposed to be a Russian invention not
available to the uncultered foreigners.) Germans reportedly found the
intercepted radio transmissions most helpful. Germans also broke the weak code
used by the Russians in east prussia within weeks. Their complete knowledge of
Russian weaknesses and troop movements led to Russian defeat in East Prussia,
after initial advances.

(The last claim is from the book _Tajnopis' v istorii Rossii_ (Cryptography in
Russian history) by T.A.Soboleva; someone ought to publish its translation.)

Soboleva also mentions that East Prussia had an advanced phone system which
the Russians didn't disable. On several occasions German civilian from remote
farms called Germany from across the front lines and reported on what the
Russians were up to.

---

Dr. Dimitri Vulis
Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps