[79271] in Cypherpunks
Re: Bypassing the Digicash Patents
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tim May)
Tue Apr 29 17:31:19 1997
X-Real-To: <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>
In-Reply-To: <v0302093eaf8be0697540@[139.167.130.246]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 13:35:15 -0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
Reply-To: Tim May <tcmay@got.net>
At 10:04 AM -0800 4/29/97, Robert Hettinga wrote:
>I certainly wasn't ignoring these guys. I suppose if you're going to be
>issuing certificates in, holding the money in trust for, or even writing
>commercial software for some kind of digital bearer certificate market, it
>would probably be a good idea not to fight off lawsuits all the time from
>the acknowleged patent holder, whether or not they're justified.
This is really for patent lawyers to argue, but the law is pretty clear
that if one is not violating a patent, one is not. In this case, the
patents apply at the blinding level. In plain terms, if Alice the Spender
and Bob the Merchant engage in a digital cash transaction, it is Alice who
does the blinding, which is what the patents cover. Bob the Merchant is not
involved in blinding (unless he is Bob the Spender in some other
transaction, but that can be atomically separated from the Alice-Bob
issues).
Now it is true that Chaum would *like* to have Bob the Merchant and Charles
the Mint as the licensee of his patents, because they are better
chokepoints for enforcement, and not have to try to track down all the
zillions of Alices, but wishing won't make it so.
"Contributory infringement" is one possible avenue of going after such
systems which bypass Chaum's patents, but this is a complicated issue.
(The Sony Betamax/Disney case was a bit similar...and has been
much-discussed. There are some interesting parallels to the Barnes/Goldberg
schemes. It was the _users_ who were not supposed to be making infringing
copies of the television shows and rented videotapes, just as it is the
purchasers of digital cash who are using the Chaum blinding patents. But
the users could not be gone after, so Disney tried to stop the vendors of
VCRs from making products which would facillitate infringement. The Court
argued, as I recall, that there are substantial noninfringing uses of VCRs,
such as making home movies, copying one's own tapes, etc. And they muttered
about time-shifting, etc. But the real reason, in my IANAL view, is that
the Court realized that enforcement of such a law would require an
intrusive police state, that the legal landscape had shifted too much, and
that home taping, even when infringing, was unstoppable. The choke point of
paid resale remained, sort of.)
I would guess that Chaum is also planning to try to get more comprehensive
patents covering the "entire system" of using digital cash in financial
transactions. Bad as software patents usually are, this trend is even worse.
For the desired market for digital cash, that of black market and
anarchistic transactions, ignoring the patents seems an obvious choice. For
the hoity-toity bankers, they'll probably avoid such things completely.
I know which side I'm on, but I'm not sure which side Bob is on.
--Tim May
There's something wrong when I'm a felon under an increasing number of laws.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."
