At 05:41 PM 2/28/00 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>
>
>On Mon, 28 Feb 2000, David Honig wrote:
>
>> Yeah right, PGP infringed on all kinds of things...
>> See http://www.cypherspace.org/~adam/timeline/
>>
>I am not sure that PGP is comparable. PGP works as long as my
>correspondents have a copy as well. Digital cash seems to require more
>widespread acceptance before it is useful. In particular, the merchant
>I want to buy things from needs to be outfitted with means of accepting
>the cash. Merchants are generally not anonymous and can be sued for
>patent infringement.
>
>Is this a problem? or did you have some other model of use in mind?
>
>Thanks,
>-David
Those are good points. The "fax" effect is real. The "businesses get sued
for software" is real. But businesses
also deal with overseas suppliers; suppose some
furriner-supplier preferred to use a US/EU-patented,
locally-unpatented EFT technology? Suppose the software
to do so was a Java applet, dynamically downloaded and then
shredded. Suppose the value being bought was not atoms,
not even bits, say, but computing cycles. Remote computing
cycles are even less tracable than bits, which at least have
volume if not weight.
Perhaps there will be a State Dept list of
verboten entities, verboten not because they are bombing
the State's properties, but merely because they're using State-feared forms
of exchange? Or verboten merely because they're not part of some eventual
GlobalFinCEN tentacle?
But you're right; too much speculation. Brands and/or Chaum should seek
therapy for their fears, deploy their tech in its full capability, legally,
widely, and get compensated in those
locales where they own patents.
