🚀 go-pugleaf

mernst@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Michael Ernst) writes:

>Dan Floyd (u-dmfloy@albion) says:
>> Did Euler or Newton copyright their formulas?  Do mathematicians
>> copyright their equations?  It would seem rather odd to pay a royalty
>> for using such equations.

>Copyrights only cover the expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves.
>Further, a formula or "law of nature" (such as e = m c^2) cannot be
>copyrighted (or, for that matter, patented).  Whether algorithms are
>formulas or laws of nature is in dispute; you can usually tell someone's
>viewpoint by whether he refers to one as being discovered or invented.

What about the RSA patent?  It covers the RSA public key encryption
algorithm.  I was going to use it in a piece of software, but it turns
out that it is covered by a patent and usage requires licensing from
the patent holders.  I find it pretty amazing that the idea of making
a ring from the product of two really big prime numbers and then doing
some straightforward modulo arithmetic on it is patentable.  I would
possibly understand if there were restritions on someone's really fast
implementation of it, but this is, in my understanding, a patent taht
covers any usage of anything that uses this RSA idea.

The best part is that all of the crypto books I have read refer to RSA
and the knapsack algs and point out that knapsack has been broken and
that RSA is the only known secure public alg.  Terrific.

Rodney

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Rodney