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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:15:57 ADT
Eric Young (eay@cryptsoft.com)
Thu, 12 Mar 1998 18:15:38 +1000 (EST)
On Wed, 11 Mar 1998, Steve Schear wrote:
> >This obviously poses problems in terms of BSAFE, RSAREF etc, but where the
> >patent concept is implimented outside of the USA by a third party (e.g
> >by Eric) it would seem to me that the patent would apply.
>
> It only applies in countries which recognize the concept of an algorithmic
> patent and which through filing or treaty recognize an RSA patent.
>
> Eric, am I correct about Australia not recognizing RSA's patents?
Yup. I have heard that one very large Australian company was visited by RSA's
legal people a few years back and told they needed a patent for RSA. They
said, get lost, and they did. Mind you, that same company now has an RSA
licence, but I belive this was so they could sell their software/hardware into
the USA.
While I agree that patents are often a good thing, especially when there is a
high R&D cost, like drugs, my concernt with software patents, specifically
crypto related ones is that the acceptance of a cipher can be greatly reduced
by a patent. Why study a cipher if some company is going to get direct $$
advantage from reports of its resistance to attack? RSAs is doing things
differntly with RC5 compaired to RC4 :-). Hopefully AES will save the day
before RC5 become too popular. It has already wormed its way into S/MIME...
TLS was delayed for quite some time due to this type of thing.
Anyway, I'm just having another grumble....
eric
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:15:57 ADT