🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rodney.649107377@dali.ipl.rpi.edu> 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