CDR: RE: New OLD cryptograph patent for NSA

[David Honig]

At 12:36 PM 10/12/00 -0400, Tim May wrote:
>In a crypto anarchic 
>society, patents will mostly be moot.)

Really?  If you have a factory, or open a virtual storefront, you have a
public
(meat, seizable) presence.   Patents are enforced by guns against locatable 
assets which have exploited the patents.   

I realize that *copyrighted* bits will be hard to track, but not an address
that
ships patent-infringing (or for that matter, trademark-infringing) goods.
To paraphrase, Meat is vulnerable, bits are safe.  But (with the exception of
software patents) patents are embodied in things, and things are traceable.