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authorKiyoshi Aman <kiyoshi.aman+adelie@gmail.com>2019-05-28 19:21:23 -0500
committerKiyoshi Aman <kiyoshi.aman+adelie@gmail.com>2019-05-28 19:21:23 -0500
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-From: James A. Woods <jaw@eos.arc.nasa.gov>
-
->From vn Fri Dec 2 18:05:27 1988
-Subject: Re: Looking for C source for RSA
-Newsgroups: sci.crypt
-
-# Illegitimi noncarborundum
-
-Patents are a tar pit.
-
-A good case can be made that most are just a license to sue, and nothing
-is illegal until a patent is upheld in court.
-
-For example, if you receive netnews by means other than 'nntp',
-these very words are being modulated by 'compress',
-a variation on the patented Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm.
-
-Original Ziv-Lempel is patent number 4,464,650, and the more powerful
-LZW method is #4,558,302. Yet despite any similarities between 'compress'
-and LZW (the public-domain 'compress' code was designed and given to the
-world before the ink on the Welch patent was dry), no attorneys from Sperry
-(the assignee) have asked you to unplug your Usenet connection.
-
-Why? I can't speak for them, but it is possible the claims are too broad,
-or, just as bad, not broad enough. ('compress' does things not mentioned
-in the Welch patent.) Maybe they realize that they can commercialize
-LZW better by selling hardware implementations rather than by licensing
-software. Again, the LZW software delineated in the patent is *not*
-the same as that of 'compress'.
-
-At any rate, court-tested software patents are a different animal;
-corporate patents in a portfolio are usually traded like baseball cards
-to shut out small fry rather than actually be defended before
-non-technical juries. Perhaps RSA will undergo this test successfully,
-although the grant to "exclude others from making, using, or selling"
-the invention would then only apply to the U.S. (witness the
-Genentech patent of the TPA molecule in the U.S. but struck down
-in Great Britain as too broad.)
-
-The concept is still exotic for those who learned in school the rule of thumb
-that one may patent "apparatus" but not an "idea".
-Apparently this all changed in Diamond v. Diehr (1981) when the U. S. Supreme
-Court reversed itself.
-
-Scholars should consult the excellent article in the Washington and Lee
-Law Review (fall 1984, vol. 41, no. 4) by Anthony and Colwell for a
-comprehensive survey of an area which will remain murky for some time.
-
-Until the dust clears, how you approach ideas which are patented depends
-on how paranoid you are of a legal onslaught. Arbitrary? Yes. But
-the patent bar the CCPA (Court of Customs and Patent Appeals)
-thanks you for any uncertainty as they, at least, stand to gain
-from any trouble.
-
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
-From: James A. Woods <jaw@eos.arc.nasa.gov>
-Subject: Re: Looking for C source for RSA (actually 'compress' patents)
-
- In article <2042@eos.UUCP> you write:
- >The concept is still exotic for those who learned in school the rule of thumb
- >that one may patent "apparatus" but not an "idea".
-
-A rule of thumb that has never been completely valid, as any chemical
-engineer can tell you. (Chemical processes were among the earliest patents,
-as I recall.)
-
- ah yes -- i date myself when relaying out-of-date advice from elderly
- attorneys who don't even specialize in patents. one other interesting
- class of patents include the output of optical lens design programs,
- which yield formulae which can then fairly directly can be molded
- into glass. although there are restrictions on patenting equations,
- the "embedded systems" seem to fly past the legal gauntlets.
-
- anyway, i'm still learning about intellectual property law after
- several conversations from a unisys (nee sperry) lawyer re 'compress'.
-
- it's more complicated than this, but they're letting (oral
- communication only) software versions of 'compress' slide
- as far as licensing fees go. this includes 'arc', 'stuffit',
- and other commercial wrappers for 'compress'. yet they are
- signing up licensees for hardware chips. hewlett-packard
- supposedly has an active vlsi project, and unisys has
- board-level lzw-based tape controllers. (to build lzw into
- a disk controller would be strange, as you'd have to build
- in a filesystem too!)
-
- it's byzantine
- that unisys is in a tiff with hp regarding the patents,
- after discovering some sort of "compress" button on some
- hp terminal product. why? well, professor abraham lempel jumped
- from being department chairman of computer science at technion in
- israel to sperry (where he got the first patent), but then to work
- at hewlett-packard on sabbatical. the second welch patent
- is only weakly derivative of the first, so they want chip
- licenses and hp relented. however, everyone agrees something
- like the current unix implementation is the way to go with
- software, so hp (and ucb) long ago asked spencer thomas and i to sign
- off on copyright permission (although they didn't need to, it being pd).
- lempel, hp, and unisys grumbles they can't make money off the
- software since a good free implementation (not the best --
- i have more ideas!) escaped via usenet. (lempel's own pascal
- code was apparently horribly slow.)
- i don't follow the ibm 'arc' legal bickering; my impression
- is that the pc folks are making money off the archiver/wrapper
- look/feel of the thing [if ms-dos can be said to have a look and feel].
-
- now where is telebit with the compress firmware? in a limbo
- netherworld, probably, with sperry still welcoming outfits
- to sign patent licenses, a common tactic to bring other small fry
- into the fold. the guy who crammed 12-bit compess into the modem
- there left. also what is transpiring with 'compress' and sys 5 rel 4?
- beats me, but if sperry got a hold of them on these issues,
- at&t would likely re-implement another algorithm if they
- thought 'compress' infringes. needful to say, i don't think
- it does after the abovementioned legal conversation.
- my own beliefs on whether algorithms should be patentable at all
- change with the weather. if the courts finally nail down
- patent protection for algorithms, academic publication in
- textbooks will be somewhat at odds with the engineering world,
- where the textbook codes will simply be a big tease to get
- money into the patent holder coffers...
-
- oh, if you implement lzw from the patent, you won't get
- good rates because it doesn't mention adaptive table reset,
- lack thereof being *the* serious deficiency of thomas' first version.
-
- now i know that patent law generally protects against independent
- re-invention (like the 'xor' hash function pleasantly mentioned
- in the patent [but not the paper]).
- but the upshot is that if anyone ever wanted to sue us,
- we're partially covered with
- independently-developed twists, plus the fact that some of us work
- in a bureacratic morass (as contractor to a public agency in my case).
-
- quite a mess, huh? i've wanted to tell someone this stuff
- for a long time, for posterity if nothing else.
-
-james
-