From: "Thaddeus J. Beier" <thad@hammerhead.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 06:40:29 -0800 (PST)
To: "sandfort@crl.com>
Subject: Re: Question on Diffie-Hellman patent
Message-ID: <199701211440.GAA06630@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> > Diffie-Hellman   4,200,770  Sept. 6, 1977  Apr. 29, 1980   Sept. 6, 1997
> > Hellman-Merkle   4,218,582  Oct. 6, 1977   Aug. 19, 1980   Oct. 6, 1997
> > RSA              4,405,829  Dec. 14, 1977  Sept. 20, 1983  Sept. 20, 2000
> 
> So who's planning on throwing a big party on Sept. 6th?  Will Jim Bizos be  
> celebrating?  :-)

Well, Jim Bizdos now has an unlimited license to the DH and HM
patents,  due to a recent settlement with Cylink, so he probably
won't be celebrating.

I'd wait 'til the October 6th date for the real party, RSA and
Cylink's lawyers have always claimed the HM gave them a claim to
all of public key cryptography...that's the one I've been waiting
for, and it's only another month :-)  This is going to be a very
good year.

If you look at Roger Schlafly's home page,
http://bbs.cruzio.com/~schlafly
you'll see that he's been fighting these guys for years; and he concedes
now that even with his herculean efforts to move the process along, the
trial probably won't come to a head before the patents expire.  I'd love
to see his estimate of how much their lawyers have spent on this over
the
years...

-- Thaddeus Beier                     thad@hammerhead.com
   Visual Effects Supervisor                408) 287-6770
   Hammerhead Productions  http://www.got.net/people/thad