At 14:47 11/10/2005 -0800, Charlie Kaufman wrote: >[... Radia Perlman and I] were approached by >David Jablon, the inventor of SPEKE but no longer >the patent holder, who suggested that we should >not assume that PDM did not infringe SPEKE and >should not make such claims to others. This was >based on claims in a patent filed many years >before but which through various techniques had >been prevented from issuing (a practice known as >'submarining').
The submarine Conspiracy Theory (and I love a good CT as much as anyone) just doesn't fit here. The five year delay between filing and issuance of 6,226,383 was due to a practice known as "bureacracy". My suggestion, that people should avoid making assertions regarding other parties' intellectual property, was based on prudence. In the case of PDM vs. the SPEKE pending patent, the authors of PDM were not in a position to know what claims would be granted. Short of disclosing pending claims, which was ill-advised for several reasons, there was nearly full disclosure. The patent's existence, and details for all the methods that I had considered to be potentially useful, were publicly disclosed in 1996 and 1997. This includes posts to sci.crypt and this cryptography mailing on using a password- selected modulus [1][2]. I told one of the authors about these posts after learning about PDM. No submariner worth his salt would pursue such a course of disclosure. -- David [1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cryptography&m=96472454824691 [2] http://groups.google.com/group/sci.crypt/msg/b14f1c24f3153e5f __________________________________________________ David Jablon www.jablon.org __________________________________ Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 http://mail.yahoo.com --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
