[118216] in Cypherpunks
Re: RSA Security, Inc.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Wed Sep 22 02:06:55 1999
Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990921185943.009ae100@idiom.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 1999 18:59:43 -0700
To: chatski carl <chatski@gl.umbc.edu>, cypherpunks@algebra.com
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.SGI.4.10A.B3.9909211106020.892385-100000@umbc9.umbc.e
du>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
At 11:11 AM 09/21/1999 -0400, chatski carl wrote:
>Wasn't the RSA technology, stolen from the american people who paid for
>it, and fenced by RSA Corp.?
University research that's patentable often works that way,
though corporate-funded university research doesn't have the
ethical problems in doing so that taxation-funded research does.
Get used to it. The big difference in our field is that until
about 20 years ago, math, algorithms, and software weren't patentable,
so it was only people in the physical and sometimes biological sciences
who could do that.
On the other hand, corporate-funded university research often
gets published and becomes available to the public.
The interesting wrinkle was that Public Key Partners not only had
the RSA patent, but also Diffie-Hellman, Hellman-Merkle, and
a couple of others, which let them assert control over the whole field
to an extent that none of the individual patents could.
One effect of this was that public-key applications tended to focus on RSA,
since you usually had to license the whole pile at once,
rather than using Diffie-Hellman key exchange, though there are also
practical reasons for that (e.g. non-interactive applications.)
In one more year it won't matter, and to the extent that Diffie-Hellman
does what you need, the RSA patent already doesn't matter.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
