Re: Mods to Dining Cryptographers: legal questions...

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)]

At 10:02 AM 7/15/95 -0500, Phil Fraering wrote:
>I'm sorry if I was a little mysterious about my reference to
>another use or mode of a DC-net; I'd _love_ to tell the rest of
>you flat-out, and put the idea in the public domain, but I'm
>not sure I _CAN_.
.....
>Are there any patents on Dining-Cryptographers networks that could
>interfere with the placing in the public domain, or the patenting, of
>an improvement to the network system?

Case 1 - you want to be able to patent your stuff yourself.  Case 2 - you don't.
For Case 1, I can't help you much, but US patent law lets you apply for a
patent on something within one year of publication (most other countries don't
allow that - if you publish before applying, you don't get to patent it.)
So publish.  For Case 2, publish.  You could get fancy and use surety.com's
date-stamping service to keep a copy of what and when you published.

If the material you've developed was already invented, and patented, 
by someone else, it's still ok to publish it, you just can't use the stuff
(except for research, etc.)  (I've been burned by this one; I _thought_ my
idea seemed obvious enough that somebody else should have already thought of
it first :-)  So if you're trying to put something in the public domain,
you may want to put a footnote in it saying that you're not making any
claims about other people's previous patent applications, etc.

So, anyway, what's your new idea?
#                                Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com