From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 09:45:15 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Party on! A patent falls, and the Internet dances
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970912183438.5321e-100000@well.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 18:34:04 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu
Subject: Party on! A patent falls, and the Internet dances

[Thanks to everyone who showed up to my patent celebration party last
Saturday. We had a lively -- even rambunctious -- mix of cypherpunks, Hill
staffers, Clinton administration officials, think tank and privacy folks,
reporters, and lobbyists. --Declan]

***********

http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/090697patent.html

New York Times
CyberTimes
September 6, 1997

A Patent Falls, and the Internet Dances

By PETER WAYNER

hen tyrants die, the people parade with the head on a
stick; when loved ones pass on in Ireland, the
families celebrate a life well-lived; but when patents
expire, they often slip away into the night.

>From the beginning, though, patent 4,200,770 was
different. This Saturday night a group of computer
scientists, Internet fanatics and Beltway politicos
will gather in Washington, D.C.; Silicon Valley; and
Boston to celebrate the end of the patent granted to
Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman for a way to
encrypt data.

The party will toast the beginning of the end of an
era when some of the greatest techniques for
encrypting information were controlled by a few
pivotal companies. The science of secret codes is
proving to be essential technology for securing the
Internet, and the techniques developed by Diffie and
Hellman are some of the most useful. Banks use them to
protect their money, companies use them to defend
against industrial espionage and parents use them to
protect their children against pedophiles and
pornographers trolling the Internet.

The patent granted to Diffie and Hellman is the first
of a group that emerged from scientists at Stanford
University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology during the end of the 1970's. On October 6,
patent 4,218,582 will expire. It was granted to
Hellman and Ralph Merkle, another graduate student at
the time, for a public key encryption system that was
later broken. The most famous patent, however, was
probably the one given to Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and
Len Adleman, who were all at MIT at the time. It will
last until September 20, 2000.

[...]