more info from talk at MIT yesterday.

Perry E. Metzger perry at imsi.com
Fri Jun 3 07:37:37 PDT 1994



Bill Sommerfeld says:
> They also confirmed Tom Knight's suspicions about what they're going
> to do when someone reverse engineers the chip and publishes the
> Skipjack algorithm & the family key: they've got a patent application
> filed, under a secrecy order; if the algorithm is published, they'll
> lift the secrecy order and have the patent issued, and use that to go
> after anyone making a compatible version.

Since when can the government patent its work? I thought that works
produced by government agencies could not be copyrighted or patented.

In any case, they cannot refuse to license a patent, so this isn't
real protection anyway. (The hope behind people patenting things they
may release in the future is to make it commercially less attractive,
not to utterly prevent use.)

Perry






More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list