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At 05:46 PM 7/29/00 -0400, P.J. Ponder wrote:
>On Sat, 29 Jul 2000, Rich Salz wrote:
...
>> I'm not sure if you are referring to SHA1 in particular, or in
>> general. While I don't know about SHA-1, the US Government *can*
>> own patents. For example, here's one that's actually kinda
>> relevent. :)
>
>Yeah, you're right. I remember the patent discussion came up a
>while back with the NSA's Semantic Forest thing. I think it's the
>heat, global warming is ruining my memory. As I recall, though,
>there was at one time a provision of law in the US that the federal
>government couldn't copyright their documents. Maybe that is
>changed now. I still seems like US federal 'inventions' should
>belong to the people. Who the hell are they representing anyway?
This is especially weird since the idea behind patents is that
they're supposed to give people the incentive to disclose their
research, in exchange for an N-year government-granted monopoly on
its use. It doesn't seem intuitively like the federal government
ought to need a special financial incentive to disclose its research.
But maybe I'm missing something.
- --John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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