Re: Ada & Encryption / Compression

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

<<I don't know exactly how you define "litigated", but several cases have
been filed and none have gone to trial but instead have ended in out of
court settlements which involved royalties being paid to RSADSI.  While
the claims may seem overbroad to a computer person such as yourself, it
would appear there is a different opinion from lawyers who actually got
involved in specific cases.>>

I mean that a court has ruled the patent valid. The fact that someone
is willing to pay a license fee, or that their lawyer advises them to
pay the fee absolutely does NOT mean the patent is valid, or that the
lawyer thinks that it is valid. More often it means that the license
fee agreed on is low enough that it is not worth the expense, and particularly
the time delay and risk, of challenging the patent. Most usually these
settlements are kept secret, and in particular the amount of the settlement
is kept secret. Very often a weak patent ends up surviving simply because
the holder knows it is weak, and asks for royalties at a level where it
is cheaper to pay than fight. 

And of course big companies all have interlocking patent sharing agreements
anyway, and an interest in having their patents be considered valid, so
they have in an interest in NOT challenging one another's patents, since
very often the only purpose of patents is to enable large players to stop
small players out of the playing field. Whether this meets the burden
placed upon patent law by the commerce clause of the consitution, I will
leave up to the reader :-)