Interview questions for Stefan Brands

[Anonymous]

pkiforum.com is soliciting questions which they will ask in
their interview with Dr. Stefan Brands.  Mail suggestions to
interviewbrands at pkiforum.com.  Here is one question submitted:

Your technologies could provide for new forms of PKI, credentials,
privacy protection, pseudonymity, and digital cash among others.
Yet you have aggressively pursued patent protection on your ideas,
a relatively uncommon approach among academic cryptographers.

David Chaum before you followed a similar strategy of aggressive patenting
followed by attempts to commercialize his technologies, which covered many
of the same subjects (although generally in a less sophisticated way).
His efforts have been a dismal failure, leaving bankruptcy and business
collapses in his wake.

How do you evaluate your patenting strategy now?  Aren't you concerned
that you will have a similar lack of success?

Would you be willing to consider donating your patents into the public
domain in the hopes that they could be exploited by P2P developers and
other decentralized, open-source efforts?  These are the people who
care about privacy, pseudonymity and the other attributes which your
technology is so ideally suited to provide.  Isn't it possible that this
would be the best path to seeing your ideas being put into practice and
bringing benefits to society?

Thanks very much for your response.