Peter Williams writes:
The thesis [that patents are bad] is fundamentally flawed in the case of publickey applications which provide or exploit digital signatures, as its assumptions are false, patently.
And you wouldn't have any financial interest in this position, would you? Frankly, I don't believe that ANY patents are legitimate, but thats not a cypherpunk topic. However, the following is: I'll be throwing a very, very big party when the public key patents expire in about two years to celebrate the freeing of modern cryptography. I have yet to decide whether to wait until both the Diffie-Hellman patent and the patent on public key itself have expired or hold it after the first goes south, as there is still some time to wait until the blessed day. Perry