MIT/RSA license documents available
More information has come out in the court case(s) between RSA and Cylink. In particular, the license between MIT and RSA, which gives RSA the exclusive rights to license the RSA patent, and its various amendments over the years, are all available from the US District Court for the Northern District of Calif. For some reason, this court is in Oakland rather than in SF where other cases in the Northern District are held. The judge is Claudia Wilken and it's case #94-2332-CW. The license and amendments are in the Attachments to document #15 ("Declaration of Robert B. Foughner...") and are all stamped "RSA DATA SECURITY CONFIDENTIAL" just for fun. In document #20, D. James Bidzos declares, under penalty of perjury, "On or about August 4, 1994, I received a telephone call from a customer of PKP. In this conversation, he told me that he had reviewed a copy of Cylink's complaint against RSA on an Internet Bulletin Board. Since then, I have myself reviewed Cylink's complaint against RSA on the Internet, as well as copies of RSA's motions to dismiss and to stay the arbitration. "When I entered the Agreement of Intent with Cylink in April of 1990 on behalf of RSA, I understood that all disputes respecting the patent licensing business we had established in PKP would be arbitrated. I entered this arbitration agreement, in part, to ensure the disputes between RSA and Cylink over the MIT patents would remain private, since the two companies were jointly licensing those patents to third parties. Since Cylink went outside the arbitration agreement and filed this lawsuit in federal court, I have received at least 25 communications (by telephone call, E-mail message, letter, fax, or face to face discussion) about the dispute. I have been asked repeatedly how PKP could license a patent when one of PKP's partners believes the patent is invalid. "This public federal court action filed by Cylink to invalidate the MIT patent has been very damaging to both RSA and the PKP partnership as a whole. I do not believe that I can clear my company RSA's good name, or that of PKP unless Cylink's broad and insistent demands for a license to use the MIT patent are also litigated in public." So, even Jim seems to think that spreading this information is a good idea. If somebody (the Information Liberation Front?) wants to scan this stuff in, I'll be glad to provide a Web/FTP site where people can get it. John
gnu@toad.com writes
"This public federal court action filed by Cylink to invalidate the MIT patent has been very damaging to both RSA and the PKP partnership as a whole.[...]"
Whoopee! In case there are some cypherpunks not familiar with the situation: The people who founded public key cryptography took out patents on various methods, patents that were entirely legitimate and justified. All of these various patents got together under a single partnership which then made the dubious claim to own *all* methods of public key cryptography, even methods such as the square root method which are substantially different from those developed by the patent holders. Those who make such a claim deserve to be afflicted with a plague of locusts and lawyers. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd@acm.org
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