patent free(?) anonymous credential system pre-print

[Adam Shostack]

On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 05:15:25PM -0800, bear wrote:
| I remember having exactly your reaction (plus issues about patenting
| math and the USPTO being subject to coercion/collusion from the NSA
| and influence-peddling and so on...) when the RSA patent issued - but
| RSA is free now, and RSA security has not made that much money on the
| cipher itself.  And frankly, I don't think that having it be free much
| earlier, given the infrastructure and implementation issues, would
| really have made that much of a difference.  Note that there are
| *still* a lot of important court decisions about asymmetric encryption
| that haven't happened yet, and it was only profitable (due to
| e-commerce) for the last couple years of the patent's run.

Actually, I think the RSA patent did make a difference:  It caused PGP
to 1) hit a wall of possibly justified FUD that delayed deployment and
2) change its public-key cipher suite in a non-interoperable way.

As such, the patent did *exactly* what patents are intended to do,
namely prevented others from using their system.  Ideally, a patent
allows the inventor to get people to pay to use their system, but in
reality, we all just invent around them, and sometimes pay for them.
But if the patented ideas are not so compelling that you can't live
without them, you can't expect to make a lot of money.

Phillips, the inventor of the CD, makes this decision easy.  See
http://www.licensing.philips.com/ or
http://www.licensing.philips.com/licensees/conditions/cd/

You want to make a cd player? 25k + 2% of the net selling price.  Sign
this 3 page simple PDF and mail it to us, we'll countersign and send
it back.

Such a program reduces FUD and especially transaction costs around a
patent enourmously.  It may also leave a heck of a lot of money on
the table.

Adam

-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume



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