Patents as a security mechanism

[Ben Laurie]

Matt Blaze wrote:
> Patents were originally intended, and are usually used (for better
> or for worse), as a mechanism for protecting inventors and their
> licensees from competition.  But I've noticed a couple of areas where
> patents are also used as a security mechanism, aiming to prevent the
> unauthorized production of products that might threaten some aspect of a
> system's security.
> 
> One example close to home is the DVD patents, which, in addition to
> providing income for the DVD patent holders, also allows them to prevent
> the production of players that don't meet certain requirements.  This
> effectively reduces the availability of multi-region players; the patents
> protect the security of the region coding system.

FWIW, the precedent was set in a lesser way with CDs - there is an area 
that isn't writable on CD-Rs, which can be prefilled at manufacture 
time. AFAIK, no-one ever actually used it as a security mechanism, but 
it was there.

On a related note, you could licence either data-only or data and music 
from Phillips (or is it Philips?), and they were pretty aggressive about 
protecting it (I know because I wrote one of the first rippers [CD-Grab] 
and they used to get excited about it periodically, since it worked on 
data-only drives).

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
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