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