[14677] in Cypherpunks
Re: more info from talk at MIT yesterday.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Perry E. Metzger)
Fri Jun 3 10:42:35 1994
To: sommerfeld@localhost.medford.ma.us (Bill Sommerfeld)
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 03 Jun 1994 09:57:36 EDT."
<199406031357.JAA00376@localhost>
Reply-To: perry@imsi.com
Date: Fri, 03 Jun 1994 10:36:37 -0400
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@imsi.com>
Bill Sommerfeld says:
> They also confirmed Tom Knight's suspicions about what they're going
> to do when someone reverse engineers the chip and publishes the
> Skipjack algorithm & the family key: they've got a patent application
> filed, under a secrecy order; if the algorithm is published, they'll
> lift the secrecy order and have the patent issued, and use that to go
> after anyone making a compatible version.
Since when can the government patent its work? I thought that works
produced by government agencies could not be copyrighted or patented.
In any case, they cannot refuse to license a patent, so this isn't
real protection anyway. (The hope behind people patenting things they
may release in the future is to make it commercially less attractive,
not to utterly prevent use.)
Perry
