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(The FSF is posting this on behalf of the League for Programming Freedom.)

I just received the following information about a software patent
that might make it harder to protect systems from viruses.

If you know of any prior art to invalidate the patent, please inform
league@prep.  DON'T POST ANYTHING ABOUT THE PRIOR ART!  This is
important--if the patent holder finds out about the prior art, he
might be able to have the patent reexamined and thus change it so that
that particular prior art won't do any good.

(For info on the general problem of software patents, write to
league@prep.ai.mit.edu, or look at the files in /pub/lpf on prep by
anonymous ftp.)

From: CHESS@YKTVMV.BITNET (David.M.Chess)
Newsgroups: comp.virus
Subject: An anti-virus patent
Date: 15 Oct 91 21:15:26 GMT

I've just run across an interesting U.S. patent.  It's number
4,975,950, granted to Stephen A. Lentz, entitled "System and Method of
Protecting Integrity of Computer Data and Software".  The filing date
is November 3, 1988.

It basically patents the idea of having a virus-checker get control
before the operating system, and not allowing boot if it finds a
virus.  One sample PC implementation is code in an additional ROM
module (on a "virus protector board") that would get control during
boot (like the hard disk BIOS, the EGA BIOS, and so on), and load and
test "the system files" (not clear if he means the boot records, or
things like IBMBIO, IBMDOS, COMMAND.COM), and not allow boot if a
virus was found (how it tells isn't spelled out).  This is just one
sample implementation; the actual claims are quite broad, and seem to
cover anything that gets control between the "program for controlling
said central processing unit" and the "program for interfacing said
storage memory with said system", by which he presumably means
ROM-like things and operating-system-like things.

...