---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 12 Sep 1997 18:34:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: fight-censorship-announce@vorlon.mit.edu Subject: Party on! A patent falls, and the Internet dances [Thanks to everyone who showed up to my patent celebration party last Saturday. We had a lively -- even rambunctious -- mix of cypherpunks, Hill staffers, Clinton administration officials, think tank and privacy folks, reporters, and lobbyists. --Declan] *********** http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/090697patent.html New York Times CyberTimes September 6, 1997 A Patent Falls, and the Internet Dances By PETER WAYNER hen tyrants die, the people parade with the head on a stick; when loved ones pass on in Ireland, the families celebrate a life well-lived; but when patents expire, they often slip away into the night.
From the beginning, though, patent 4,200,770 was different. This Saturday night a group of computer scientists, Internet fanatics and Beltway politicos will gather in Washington, D.C.; Silicon Valley; and Boston to celebrate the end of the patent granted to Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman for a way to encrypt data.
The party will toast the beginning of the end of an era when some of the greatest techniques for encrypting information were controlled by a few pivotal companies. The science of secret codes is proving to be essential technology for securing the Internet, and the techniques developed by Diffie and Hellman are some of the most useful. Banks use them to protect their money, companies use them to defend against industrial espionage and parents use them to protect their children against pedophiles and pornographers trolling the Internet. The patent granted to Diffie and Hellman is the first of a group that emerged from scientists at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the end of the 1970's. On October 6, patent 4,218,582 will expire. It was granted to Hellman and Ralph Merkle, another graduate student at the time, for a public key encryption system that was later broken. The most famous patent, however, was probably the one given to Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman, who were all at MIT at the time. It will last until September 20, 2000. [...]