FW: How broad is the SPEKE patent.

[D Jablon]

At 14:47 11/10/2005 -0800, Charlie Kaufman wrote:
>[... Radia Perlman and I] were approached by
>David Jablon, the inventor of SPEKE but no longer
>the patent holder, who suggested that we should
>not assume that PDM did not infringe SPEKE and
>should not make such claims to others. This was
>based on claims in a patent filed many years
>before but which through various techniques had
>been prevented from issuing (a practice known as
>'submarining').

The submarine Conspiracy Theory (and I love a good
CT as much as anyone) just doesn't fit here. The
five year delay between filing and issuance of
6,226,383 was due to a practice known as
"bureacracy".

My suggestion, that people should avoid making
assertions regarding other parties' intellectual
property, was based on prudence. In the case of
PDM vs. the SPEKE pending patent, the authors of
PDM were not in a position to know what claims
would be granted.

Short of disclosing pending claims, which was
ill-advised for several reasons, there was nearly
full disclosure. The patent's existence, and
details for all the methods that I had considered
to be potentially useful, were publicly disclosed
in 1996 and 1997. This includes posts to sci.crypt
and this cryptography mailing on using a password-
selected modulus [1][2]. I told one of the authors
about these posts after learning about PDM.

No submariner worth his salt would pursue such a
course of disclosure.

-- David

[1]
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cryptography&m=96472454824691
[2]
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.crypt/msg/b14f1c24f3153e5f

__________________________________________________
David Jablon
www.jablon.org



	
		
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