From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 17:08:34 +0800
To: "baldwin" <cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: RC2 Source Code - Legal Warning from RSADSI
Message-ID: <m0tiGjw-00091tC@pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Despite being totally uninvolved with whatever this guy's talking about, Jim
Bell is responding:


At 11:06 AM 2/1/96 PST, baldwin wrote:
>
>WARNING NOTICE
>
>        It has recently come to the attention of RSA Data
>Security, Inc. that certain of its confidential and
>proprietary source code has been misappropriated and
>disclosed.  Despite such unauthorized use and disclosure,
>RSA Data Security reserves all intellectual property rights
>in such source code under applicable law, including without
>limitation trade secret and copyright protection.

Hey, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, but as I understood 
the law keeping something a secret was an alternative to disclosing it with 
a patent.  Patents had certain advantages and disadvantages; trade secrets 
had other advantages and other disadvantages.  A famous example, the 
"formula for Coca-Cola" was kept secret for decades; to patent it would have 
allowed anybody else to build Coca-Cola after 17 years of patent protection. 
 Keeping it secret could, theoretically last forever, but the legal 
protection against copying is less or even non-existent.

I am well aware that the legal system has been abusing the whole concept of 
patenting software, etc, ever since they discovered they wanted to keep the 
country from using RSA in the middle 1970's.

However, it seems to me that if your "trade secret" is now disclosed, then 
it really isn't a "trade secret" anymore and you lose "trade secret" status. 
 You may have a valid claim against the discloser, but that SHOULD be 
unrelated to everyone else.

It sounds like you want the best of both worlds:  You want to claim "trade 
secret" status for something that you either can't or don't want to patent.