[738] in libertarians
Re: Zimmerman case
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin THEOBALD)
Thu Feb 23 13:09:50 1995
From: theobald@duke.cs.mcgill.ca (Kevin THEOBALD)
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 13:03:27 -0500
In-Reply-To: sethf@MIT.EDU's message [Re: Zimmerman case] as of Feb 23, 12:26
To: sethf@MIT.EDU, libertarians@MIT.EDU
| Nope. They didn't even know what the PGP program was, and had to
| have it explained to them. The person who sic'ed customs on Zimmerman
| was the President of RSA Data Security, Inc, James Bidzos. He did this
| because he was annoyed at Phil Zimmerman for not paying him umpteen
| thousands of dollars in licensing fees for PGP. Rather than seek civil
| redress, he used the government to stick the taxpayers with the bill for
| his revenge, turning it into a criminal matter (a rather common tactic
| for software publishers).
That would seem to be the case. In Canada, too. I have a friend who
got into a contract dispute with a Montreal company that ended up that
way. They signed an agreement that my friend would develop the product,
using their systems for alpha tests, and would give them exclusive
marketing rights in exchange for royalties. He was given no money, only
the promise of royalties. (Later, they paid him advances on the
royalties, and claimed that that made him an "employee.")
However, once the agreement was signed, they started to fight over who
really "owned" the product. When my friend detected a potential security
breach on the system, he backed up and deleted the source code. They
used this as an excuse to try to cut him out: they went to the police
and accused him of stealing the data.
| Sorry, while it would be nice to think of this case as motivated
| by an evil government repressing The People, it was in reality
| instigated by an evil businessman in the service of monopolistic goals
| and distortion of the free market. The export-control nonsense is one
| side of the story. But the other side is the RSA software patent, a very
| broad legal monopoly defended in the name of intellectual property rights.
What exactly does the RSA patent cover? All public-key cryptography?
Or just the dual prime number scheme that is at the heart of RSA?
Anyway, there must be *some* evil motives in the government. Otherwise,
why didn't they tell Bidzos to go get his own lawyer and stop trying to
get them to do his dirty work?
Kevin Theobald
