From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 20:28:20 -0800 (PST)
To: Greg Broiles <iang@cs.berkeley.edu (Ian Goldberg)
Subject: Re: RSA challenge: is it legal to try?
Message-ID: <199701150427.UAA12865@mail.pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 11:47 PM 1/13/97 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:

> Presumably the RC5 patent (if one is awarded) won't suffer from
>the peculiarities of the international patent schemes which made RSA only
>patentable in the US.


"Pecularities"?  If anything, the peculiarities would have been within _US_ 
law, and not international law. 

As I understand it, most people cite the requirement that an invention 
patent must be applied-for BEFORE disclosure as a requirement for most 
international patents, which explained by RSA wasn't patented outside of the 
US.  Alone, that would have denied non-US patents to RSA.   However, such an 
explanation grandly ignores the fact that computer software (let alone 
mathematics in general) was not considered patentable ANYWHERE (?) before 
public-key systems made their appearance in 1976.

It also ignores the strong likelihood that the reason for the Patent-Office 
policy change (done, apparently, without benefit of a corresponding law 
change) was because with public-key/RSA there was finally an example of 
software the government wished to deny to the average citizen, and the only 
mechanism (short of secrecy, which was broken) to do so was to patent it.  

I'm still waiting for an "innocent" explanation for the US patent office 
beginning to issue software patents.  I don't think there is one.


Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com