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Re: Sternlight & PGP
: From: Greg Broiles <[email protected]>
: action against them if they didn't stop making PGP available via FTP. I
: suspect (but cannot prove) that he was also the person who reported those
: FTP sites to Bidzos, thus creating the lawsuit threat that he then pretended
: to protect the FTP sites from.
He recently owned up to it on alt.security.pgp ... In fact, he was
bragging about it and how in fact he had "won" if anybody had won...
G
PS Here's the post:
Newsgroups: alt.security.pgp
Path: an-teallach.com!demon!uknet!doc.ic.ac.uk!agate!library.ucla.edu!csulb.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!strnlght
From: [email protected] (David Sternlight)
Subject: Re: Not Phil Zimmermann, Mark Riordan.
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Reply-To: [email protected] (David Sternlight)
Organization: DSI/USCRPAC
References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]>
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 1994 04:30:29 GMT
Lines: 82
In article <[email protected]>,
Alex Strasheim <[email protected]> wrote:
>>Finally a few words about the "we won" nonsense at the end of Alex's
>>message.
>
>>There is no "we" and there was never anything to "win".
>
>I beg to differ: we won, and you lost. We being the friends of PGP, and
>you being, well, just you.
You don't get it.
I LIKE PGP. I grabbed it when I first saw it. Only when I found it infringed
RSADSI's patents did I feel I needed to take action.
That action was a deliberate strategy:
1. I worked behind the scenes urging Jim Bidzos of RSADSI to find a way to
license PGP. I did so in a sustained and intense way. Ask him. We discussed
many options, and he checked with his lawyers on each one. (I was not the
only one and claim no special credit).
2. In order to persuade Jim it was clear to me that I had to defend his
patent rights in public. Any attempt to force PGP down his throat was doomed
to fail in my view. Thus I gave no quarter, and no comfort to those
attacking RSADSI, following a strategy of deliberate provocation, or in any
way making it harder for Jim to compromise (recall that HE has the patent,
not the PGP fans. Recall also that it is an MIT/Stanford University patent,
not some commercial exploiter of the civil liberties of the downtrodden.)
3. In a small number of instances I saw some underhanded cheating going on
that could threaten sites I use and benefit from. By "underhanded cheating"
I mean posting infringing software which I had good reason to believe put
sites at risk with neither the permission nor knowledge of the site admins
or owners. I have never objected to individuals putting PGP up on their own
computers with full knowledge of the risks they were taking.
In conversations with Jim he told me he was going to go after those sites
and close them down. I didn't want that to happen, so I reported the
background to a very few sites I used, leaving the site admins to make up
their own minds what to do. In one case a user was asked to remove PGP and
did. In another case it was taken down. In a third case the site declined to
get involved. Note that in each case I was a party at interest and felt I
might be damaged by the consequences of PGP being up there; rightly or
wrongly my conversations with Bidzos led me to believe he was preparing
imminent action, and I thus took my own action to warn sites I used, to
protect myself from the possibility of losing their services.
I have explained this repeatedly, but the PGP infringers, having not a leg
to stand on, decided to react with a smoke screen of vilification,
defamation, and falsehoods about my motives, and even my bona fides, since
they could not confront the issues honestly and directly given their dirty
hands in the matter. For some of the worst excesses, read this week's New
Yorker article: "My First Flame."
That's it. There was never a hidden agenda, or the assumption of any net.cop
role--I acted to protect a very few sites I benefitted from, and even then
only by presenting the facts and leaving it up to the admins. I acted in a
way designed form the start to get a non-infringing PGP available in the
U.S.
Thus if anyone won, I did. I now have what I've been seeking all along, a
non-infringing version of PGP, thanks to MIT. The de facto standard version
of PGP in the U.S. is properly licensed by RSADSI. It will drive out the
infringing versions in very short order and we can all, honestly and
legally, use PGP.
If anyone lost, it is the juvenile thugs flaunting their disobedience to
authority. PGP hit its limits with the infringing version in the U.S. No
serious company or law abiding professional would consider it as long as it
was under a cloud. Now the infringing versions are about to become history,
and using PGP 2.6 in the U.S. is an act of legitimacy, not an act of
disobedience to authority or disrespect for patents one doesn't like. Those
with authority figure problems will have to find another "cause"--they've
now been very effectively deprived of this one by the simple expedient of
respect for others' property. It was a long, hard fight, but in the end,
despite the obfuscation, slime, lies, defamation, playground bully, and
hoodlum tactics of a short list of people--names available on request :-) --
the good guys won.
David