CDR: Internet bearer cryptography patent trusts (was Re: Chaumian cash redux)

[R. A. Hettinga]

This idea below of a "patent pool" is similar to the bearer cryptography
patent trust idea I was kicking around with a couple of investment bankers
here in Boston a few years ago...

It seems that these guys were sitting on a public shell, and were noticing
that both Millicent and DigiCash were both up for sale at the time, and
were trying, like every one does, :-), to figure how to make money with
them.

I suggested that, while the code for Millicent at least might be valuable,
that the patents were the most valuable thing about *either* of those
businesses. I talked to these gentlemen about the model I had for internet
bearer underwriting and how it could pay royalties right off the top to
certain global holders of patents like blind signatures, allowing their use
even for open source software, and that it might be possible to create
something like a publicly held trust to hold those kinds of patents.

Just like if someone like when Warren Buffet buys a company, the patent
holders would get a liquid publicly traded asset, and the trust would
collect royalties as revenues of the corporation, and the stock would go up
accordingly. :-).

Don't know if it would work, though, and not just for purely financial
reasons, either.  It seems to me at the outset that unless Chaum has a way
to completely kill the usefulness of the blind signature patent and replace
it with something better -- and to withstand the inevitable charge from
Ecash Technologies that he knew about it at the time of the DigiCash
liquidation, which would be a pretty serious legal cat-fight whether the
charge were true or not -- that Ecash Technologies has enough funding from
Deutchebank and others to make it a long time before the original Chaumian
patent portfolio will be on the market again, if ever. The patents expire,
speaking of such things, in 2007, after all.

Cheers,
RAH

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