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Defensive patents




One more note on patents until Ashar gets us the right forum to discuss it...

Ashar, I understood that your (Sun) motivation is to defend against other
patents. I'm not sure why this requires any fees in addition to a patent
(even our lawyers were not concerned about this, and believe me, they are
very careful people and were concerned about many other things...).

But, I"m not even sure this requires a patent at all; legally a publication
should be enough (which you already did). Maybe you are afraid the patent
office would not be aware of the publication (which is a reasonable cocern -
one of the problem with the patent process is that these poor people are
supposed to read our conferences - even most of us don't... :-).

So, you may be interested to know that Allan Schiffman thinks there is
a non-patent way to do this (see below)... And believe me, filing for
a patent very painful process which you want to avoid if you can (and
it cost money so Sun should agree)...

Best, Amir

p.s. Let me recommend again to everybody interested in the higher layers
of the key management to give a look also to SHTTP. It has many good
points. The new version should come out Real Soon Now (says Allan).


> Date: Tue, 15 Nov 94 23:11:49 PST
> From: ams@eit.com (Allan M Schiffman)
> Message-Id: <9411160711.AA22171@eitech.eit.com>
> To: cmcmanis@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM
> Subject: Re: Secure HTTP mailing list
> Cc: treese@openmarket.com, www-security@ns1.rutgers.edu
>
> > Since public key
> > technology appears at this stage to be essential to any useful secure
> > protocol, RSADSI, PKP, and EIT have the rest of the net by their
> > cyber short hairs.
> RSADSI/PKP, maybe, but EIT disclaims intent to patent any of the
> techniques embodied in the protocol. In fact, we understand that the
> Patent Office has a "public disclosure" mechanism for non-patented work
> to be incorporated into their prior-art database, and if we can just
> figure out how to use it, we'll file such disclosures to prevent others
> from obstructing S-HTTP implementations via patent.
>
> -Allan
>

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