At 11:47 PM 1/13/97 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:

Presumably the RC5 patent (if one is awarded) won't suffer from the peculiarities of the international patent schemes which made RSA only patentable in the US.

"Pecularities"? If anything, the peculiarities would have been within _US_ law, and not international law. As I understand it, most people cite the requirement that an invention patent must be applied-for BEFORE disclosure as a requirement for most international patents, which explained by RSA wasn't patented outside of the US. Alone, that would have denied non-US patents to RSA. However, such an explanation grandly ignores the fact that computer software (let alone mathematics in general) was not considered patentable ANYWHERE (?) before public-key systems made their appearance in 1976. It also ignores the strong likelihood that the reason for the Patent-Office policy change (done, apparently, without benefit of a corresponding law change) was because with public-key/RSA there was finally an example of software the government wished to deny to the average citizen, and the only mechanism (short of secrecy, which was broken) to do so was to patent it. I'm still waiting for an "innocent" explanation for the US patent office beginning to issue software patents. I don't think there is one. Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com