Roger Schlafly had a brief hearing this morning in Judge Williams federal court on summary judgements with respect to the validity of the various public key patents, and alleged anti-trust and unfair trade practices. Bob Wells and I were the only pro-tossing-the-patents out people there, although sometimes-cypherpunk-meeting-attender Whit Diffie was there as well. The judge said right at the outset that he would not be making a decision today, that he wanted guidance from Roger and the other sides lawyers about the relevant issues, to help him wade through the tremendous amounts of documentation provided. I suppose that this could be expected, but the issues here seemed to me, at least, to be relatively clear-cut. There were basically four issues to be discussed, the Diffie-Hellman, Hellman-Merkle, and RSA patents, and these unfair trade practices. The judge had only allocated an hour for this discussion, and then showed up 20 minutes late, which proved inadequate. Still, I thought that everyone was remarkably clear and concise with their answers, and the judge asked reasonable questions. First discussed were the unfair trade practices, where the lawyer for what used to be PKP dragged in a lot of dirty laundry from the past, describing why Roger got interested in this in the first place. I don't understand what the complaint here was, the PKP lawyer said that since Roger didn't have a product, what was he complaining about, anyway? It seemed like an odd defense to me, but again, I don't know exactly what Roger's complaint was. Roger agreed with the judge that yes, everything he wanted to say was in his submission. Next discussed was the Diffie-Hellman patent. Roger stated that he had four clear instances where the an "enabling disclosure" was made about Diffie-Hellman; three were presentations to large audiences, and one was a pre-print of the famous "New Directions in Cryptography" paper. Roger actually had the viewgraphs that Diffie used in his presentations. These disclosures were all made more than 1 year before the patent was filed, which is the limit in the US. The lawyer from CalCan (something like that) handled this one. He said that the law specifically mentioned publication, and that none of these was a publication. I'm not sure what the law says, and Roger disputed the claim that that is what the law says. Disappointingly to me, it appears that neither Diffie or Hellman have any recollection of when, to whom, or how many preprints of the article were sent out. It's terrible how the law seems to cloud people's minds, isn't it? What little I do know about patent law tends to support Roger on this one, I think that it should be an open and shut case, but we'll see. Then we came to the Hellman-Merkle patent, which basically claims all of public-key cryptography. Roger's claim here was that the mechanism described doesn't work, because knapsacks don't work, that is, the invention is supposed to make generation of the decryption key infeasable, by a very specific description of infeasability in the claims of the patent. (10^30 arithmetic operation necessary) Well, that's not true. The same lawyer for the other side took this on two different ways: 1) that nobody knew that knapsacks were insecure at the time that the patent was filed, how could the patent be found invalid based on something that happened later 2) and some variations (dense, iterated knapsacks) might still be secure. Roger presented an analogy. Say someone was able to persuade the patent office that a drug cured cancer, and so he was able to obtain a patent on it. Later, it was found that the drug killed everybody who took it. Should the patent be valid, if it really didn't do what it said that it would? Roger could have gotten melodramatic, and said that bad cryptography could really kill people, and has many times, but he didn't; as I said, everybody was remarkably concise and to the point. Even so, we were out of time here, not having discussed the RSA patent or the Schnorr patent at all. The judge said that he will call another hearing if he feels that it is required. I thought, in my incredible naivete, that it went really well for Roger, although I didn't have time to hang around and ask him how he thought it went. I think that his arguements are good, and if the law is sensible he will prevail. thad -- Thaddeus Beier email: thad@hammerhead.com Technology Development vox: 408) 286-3376 Hammerhead Productions fax: 408) 292-2244