Re: Ada & Encryption / Compression

[kilgallen@eisner.decus.org (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <dewar.857858068@merv>, dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:
> <<"Prime Numbers" is irrelevant, as those are made up by end users (with
> the help of software or hardware) in any trustworthy implementation.
> If you substitute "code" for "prime numbers", the answer is A for
> both cases.  The key phrase is "for the U.S. market".
>>>
> 
> Most countries have bilateral agrements to repsect one anothers patents,
> so it is not the case that patents in the US apply to the US only.

All parties involved in this patent agree that it is US-only.  One story
is that there is (or was at the time) a filing deadline for various of
the European countries which was missed.  Another is that some countries
require (or required) filing before publication whereas in the US it is
(or was) within one year after publication.  This is a chicken-and-the-egg
problem in the area of crypto, since if you file for a US patent prior to
publication the government (NSA) has the opportunity of declaring your new
technique classified and forbidding you to use or talk about it in public.
If the NSA had the opportunity starting with the Diffie-Hellman paper, they
would have nipped public-key crypto in the bud.  Please let us not start a
discussion about whether they should have or would today, but that was their
behaviour at the time.  It's just very hard to "unpublish" an article from
Communications of the ACM and you get unfavorable news coverage of the book
burnings.

Larry Kilgallen