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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:37 ADT
John Viveiros (source@iaccess.za)
Thu, 16 Jul 1998 13:40:13 +0200
Certicom and other bodies have no real patents rights regarding ECC despite
their claims as this is not a "new" invention or "unknown" invention and is
public knowledge which was propagated in the public domain before they were
born.
A basic tenate of a patent is that it must be something new and unknown.
Like the folk at Open Market who have had their patents accepted by the USA
patent office.
Once challenged by a competent legal team it should all just fall away, in
the meantime they all just use it as a simple marketing tool to create
market space for themselves through the creation of FUD (fear, uncertainty
and Doubt) IBM is undoubtly the best known for these tactics as law abiding
citizens feel obligated by these threats.
What this highlights of course is that patents are not suited for the
smaller business who cannot fight long drawn out cases without financial
assistance which was one of the original intents behind patent law.
One way around all the patent issues is to provide the and use the
techonology through free distribution into the public domain by non-profit
organisations who have no finance to be sued for legal damages. By doing
this the individual which is a separate entity cannot be sued and the
company can fall away and be restarted as a brand new enitity.
Another arguement is that strong cryptography is an individuals right to
privacy, but then it would have to fought for whereas the more guerilla
tactics as mentioned above have been known to be far more successful.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Young <eay@cryptsoft.com>
To: Bruce Schneier <schneier@counterpane.com>
Cc: CodherPlunks@toad.com <CodherPlunks@toad.com>
Date: Thursday, July 16, 1998 9:13 AM
Subject: Re: Elliptical Curve Encryption
>
>On Wed, 15 Jul 1998, Bruce Schneier wrote:
>> Can someone give me a pointer to the Certicom patent claims. I must have
been
>> asleep here.
>
>http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/letters/Certicom.txt
>is the letter they sent in response to the P1363 enquiry.
>
> In the event that the standard cannot be practiced without the use
> of one or more issued patents which are now or hereafter owned or
> controlled by Certicom, Certicom agrees upon request to grant a
> non-exclusive license under such patent or patents on a
> nondiscriminatory basis and on reasonable terms and conditions
> including its then current royalty rates and provided a similar
> grant under licensee's patents within the scope of the license
> granted to licensee is made available upon request to Certicom.
>
>The royalty etc means that there will be a $$ cost associated with ECC if
>Certicom has a patent that covers your product. They will probably be fair
>and reasonable but there is still a cost and I don't know how free software
>will fit into their plans.
>
>eric
>
>
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:20:37 ADT