RE: math patents

[Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>]

At 09:46 AM 4/16/96 -0800, jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com> wrote
various amusing paranoid conspiracy theory :-) about software patents.
I tend to agree that the concept is bogus, and it's further aggavated
by the Patent Office's technical incompetence in the area which has
led to granting of patents for things that are well covered by
prior art and obviousness to skilled practitioners.  However.

The first software patent, AFAIK, was Dennis Ritchie's setuid patent from Unix.
I'm not sure when it was granted, but it must have been applied for
a couple years before Diffie-Hellman was developed.  Unlike RSA, where
it's fun to talk about RSA/PKP/etc.'s evil conspiracy with the government
(in spite of the foreign citizenship of one of them and some amusing
uncooperativeness that's let them pull off when threatened) but it's way
bogus to argue that in the case of Whit Diffie (I don't know Hellman.)
While PKP did acquire the Stanford patents for a while, they weren't the
ones who applied for them and didn't form for a while after they
were granted.  Remember that RSA was developed a couple of years after DH.

>I am still mystified, however!  If I understand the thrust of the legal 
>cases you cited, purely mathematical algorithms are still not patentable, 
>yet the patents on public-key cryptography are about the most purely 
>mathematical ones that could be imagined.  They are not an element in the 
>process, they ARE the process.

The patents are carefully written to make it clear that the process is
"protecting private data" rather than "Crunching numbers in some
mathematically interesting way."

>Patents would not have prevented the Russians from using RSA, nor any other 
>foreigners, so as far as I can see the only group of people impaired by the 
>RSA patent were American citizens as a group.  

(Other than Canadians..)  The reason that RSA isn't patentable in other
countries isn't because the US is the only place that permits
algorithm patents (many countries do, and even provide more than US;
e.g. IDEA is patented in Switzerland.)  It's because most other countries
don't grant patents after publication, and because of the major FUD that
the NSA cast over cryptographic research in the 70s and 80s, it's been
necessary to publish the theory before applying for patents - if you do
it the other way around, the NSA can slam patent secrecy orders on
your patent applications, like they did even for a wimpy analog scrambler
for CB radio in the late 70s (which _was_ clearly done to impair American
access to crypto..)


>
#					Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215