Xref: utzoo gnu.misc.discuss:1317 trial.misc.legal.software:19 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!umich!yale!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,trial.misc.legal.software Subject: Re: Copyrights Message-ID: <2096:Jul2900:53:4390@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Date: 29 Jul 90 00:53:43 GMT References: <1990Jul27.014947.19528@hellgate.utah.edu>> Organization: IR Lines: 32 In article rodney@ipl.rpi.edu (Rodney Peck II) writes: > What about the RSA patent? Quite obviously not enforceable. I detailed the reasons for this in a misc.legal article some time back. Every court case dealing with algorithms has ended up with the same result: A mathematical algorithm, in and of itself, is not patentable. A process that takes numbers, and performs certain mathematical operations upon them to produce other numbers, is not the subject of a patent. (These aren't exact quotes; dredge through your USCA or my previous article for details.) RSA (like many other patent holders) has tried to get around this restriction by patenting ``only'' all applications of an algorithm, rather than the algorithm itself. There are other cases establishing that this is unsupportable: although a particular implementation or application of the algorithm may constitute sufficient invention to warrant a patent, a different implementation cannot fall under the same patent. I'd love to see RSA challenged in court. By the way, the 1981 decision that software patenters keep gibbering about didn't say that software patents were valid. What happened was that company A used a computer in one part of an innovative method for doing process X. Now it has been established that using a computer to perform an algorithm doesn't make the algorithm patentable. Company B took the opportunity to challenge A's patent, saying that the use of a computer rendered the entire process unpatentable. This is, of course, backwards: using a computer doesn't give you a patent, but it doesn't take away a patent either. And that's all the court said. ---Dan