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The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:01 ADT
Anonymous (nobody@replay.com)
Thu, 30 Jul 1998 08:43:24 +0200
The IP profs on Cyberia-L may have chewed on Cylink attorney Patrick
J. Flinn (not Flynn!) after his 1997 article in CyberLaw declared the RSA
PKC patent "far more limited in scope and far more vulnerable to a
validity challenge than is generally assumed" -- but the one page
retort from RSA attorney Bob Haslam, subsequently also published in
CyberLaw, gives a strong indication of why Haslam had Flinn for lunch
whenever they crossed swords.
See: <http://www.cyberlaw.com/rthrsa.html>
Haslam's surgical rebuttal also offers a fascinating nugget for those
interested in the history of American commercial cryptography and
cryptographic algorithms as intellectual property.
In 1995 and 1996, Haslam represented RSA against Cylink, Cylink's
subsidiary Carol-Kann Corp., and Stanford University in a case
involving the scope and validity of the Hellman-Merkle patent and the
Diffie-Hellman patent, the so-called "Stanford Patents." Flinn was on
the other side, and separately represented Cylink in another suit
against RSA to define patent priorities and ownership rights in the
breakup of Public Key Partners, the one-time licensing partnership of
RSA and Cylink/CKC.
Cylink eventually dumped Flinn, sued for peace, and shelled out for an
RSA license in a costly New Years Eve settlement in December, 1996.
Noted Haslam:
"[...] I believe the real impetus for the settlement agreement was
Cylink's concerns about the weaknesses of the Stanford Patents.
"In December, 1996, the Court presiding over the Stanford Patent
litigation advised the parties of his claim construction ruling
regarding the Hellman-Merkle Patent. The Court agreed with RSA that
the broad claims of the Hellman-Merkle Patent were subject to Section
112, paragraph 6 of the patent statute, thus limiting those claims to
covering only the trapdoor knapsack algorithm and its equivalents, not
all public key algorithms. The Court further indicated his
intention to stay the case and certify the issue for immediate appeal
to the Federal Circuit.
"The parties, who had been in mediation and bilateral settlement talks
for over a year, entered into a global settlement agreement within two
weeks of that ruling."
No question about who walked away with all the marbles.
The following archive was created by hippie-mail 7.98617-22 on Fri Aug 21 1998 - 17:21:01 ADT