[Cryptography] To what is Anderson referring here?

[fukami]

Hey Jerry!

On 04.06.2014, at 13:10, Jerry Leichter <jerry.leichter at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think we have the meat here for an Anderson-like study:  Has any actually made money from a crypto-related patent?  The EKE/SPEKE patents have blocked progress on authentication for years; but has anyone actually licensed them?

I have no idea about the licensing, but with J-PAKE there is an alternative to EKE/SPEKE which is patent-free, so it might get a better adoption in the future. 

> The results are of both theoretical and practical interest.  From a theoretical point of view, it would inform, with actual data, the debate about the public interest issues in patents:  If the only real effect of crypto patents is to make the subject of the patent unavailable to the public for the patent's lifetime, then patenting of such material does not fulfill the public interest goals of making inventions broadly available.  From a practical point of view, if it can be shown that patents in this area are essentially worthless - you pay to get a piece of paper, but no one will buy what you're selling - it might be easier to convince people to freely license their patents (assuming they get them at all).

For me, patents don't make much sense at all nowadays because they are mainly there for fighting stupid legal battles without getting something useful out for the general public but make lawyers rich and push products from competitors away from the markets.

As Ross pointed out in the conversation I was referring to "there were lots of patents issued by companies during the dotcom bubble that tend to be badly written with very general claims that nonetheless got granted by clueless patent examiners". For the time being we need to stick with everything crypto which is very clearly free and open to use. 

> Sounds like a nice master's thesis for someone in an economics department or some related field.

For me it looks pretty much the same problem like with software patents. 


Regards,
  fukami