CDR: RE: New OLD cryptograph patent for NSA

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Thu Oct 12 22:59:00 PDT 2000


At 11:36 PM 10/12/00 -0400, David Honig wrote:
>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.

It's often hard to tell whether a physical object violates
a given patent or not - bitspace is often pretty subtle stuff,
especially if it's manufacturing methods rather than end results
that are the subject of the patent.

But increasingly, the interesting patents are (gak) software,
(gak gak) algorithms, and (gak phfft) business methods,
all of which are basically bits that are potentially easy to make untraceable.
Sure, if you actually have to ship somebody the infringing code
on a CDROM or DVD, then there's some traceability,
but that's decreasingly interesting as a distribution method.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639






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