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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:00 ADT
Vin McLellan (vin@shore.net)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 01:07:22 -0400
Vin McLellan <vin@shore.net> wrote:
>> Actually, I had just read the paper Claus Schorr submitted to the
>>IEEE in March. I don't think I had ever seen him or anyone else make the
>>argument before -- although, of course, I had heard of it. Anyone have any
>>comments on it? See:
>><http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/letters/SchnorrMar98.html>
Tim Dierks <timd@consensus.com> replied:
>I had previously disregarded the Schnorr patent w.r.t. DSA, as the US
>patent clearly covers only smartcards (maybe other hardware implementations
>as well; I forget).
>
>Apparently, the overseas patents may include more claims, which may cover
>software implementations. (I haven't reviewed the patents; I am not a
>lawyer.)
>
>One point of interest: I'm sure the US patent got submitted with the same
>claims as the European & Japanese patents. Why were the broader claims
>refused? I'm guessing that there is prior art which was uncovered by the US
>examiner, but did not come up in the European process; in this case,
>examining the file associated with the patent may reveal it....
As I heard the tale, Prof. Dr. Schnorr simply turned to the wrong
attorney when he decided to file his patent in the US.
In any case, the differences between the American and European (and
Japanese) Schnorr patents are _not_ the result of illegitimate claims which
were accepted by a European bureaucrat but rejected by some eagle-eyed
American patent examiner.
As filed, Schnorr's US patent <4,995,082> apparently failed to make
the same claims as his European and Japanese patents did and do. The
structure of a US patent application apparently require a restatement of
the scope of each claim, while in a European patent that is not necessarily
the case.
In the folklore of US patent lawyers, Dr. Schnorr is a classic case
of an inventor who was poorly represented by an attorney (either European
or American) who simply didn't realize that American and international
patent applications have (or had) different procedureal rules. By the time
the limitations of Schnorr's US patent filing were understood, it was too
late to refile it with claims as expansive as those used in his original
European patent.
If Claus Schnorr, no lightweight, is correct in his claims that his
European and Japanese patents (see his IEEE letter at the URL above) cover
both DSA and the Nyberg/Rueppel digital signature scheme the ineptness of
his US patent filing was very costly. I believe Dr. Schnorr's non-American
patents have another decade to run.
Ulf Möller <3umoelle@informatik.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
>I haven't seen the European patent. But it is curious that the
>original patent submission (publication number 0383985) was retracted,
>and patent 0384475 was granted for a later submission.
>
>Maybe in the original submission the claims were restricted to
>hardware (perhaps because it wasn't clear that the EPO would have
>accepted a patent on software), and in a later submission was
>broadened to also cover software implementations.
>Just a random guess.
Sorry. I know nothing of the history in that case.
Suerte,
_Vin
>Tim Dierks - timd@consensus.com - www.consensus.com
> VP of Engineering - Consensus Development
> Developer of SSL Plus: SSL 3.0 Integration Suite
-----
"Cryptography is like literacy in the Dark Ages. Infinitely potent, for
good and ill... yet basically an intellectual construct, an idea, which by
its nature will resist efforts to restrict it to bureaucrats and others who
deem only themselves worthy of such Privilege."
_ A Thinking man's Creed for Crypto _vbm.
* Vin McLellan + The Privacy Guild + <vin@shore.net> *
53 Nichols St., Chelsea, MA 02150 USA <617> 884-5548
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:00 ADT