Forward to list because I used the wrong sender address.
--- Begin Message ---Nadim Kobeissi on Tue, Nov 29 2016: > * Silent Circle were contacted by Open Whisper Systems and asked to modify > their implementation, which they ended up renaming to ZINA as a > consequence, away from LibSalamander ("Zina is Not Axolotl"). > * ChatSecure almost lost their U.S. public funding to implement Signal > Protocol, until an agreement could be reached regarding whether a totally > independent implementation could be published on the App Store. > * Wire claims to have been asked for USD $2.5M for licensing fees for > Signal Protocol after writing their own implementation, and were forced to > update their independent implementation with a copyright notice for Open > Whisper Systems. > * Some other projects are also claiming that in the past year, before these > specs were published, they were asked to pay a licensing fee even if they > intended to independently implement Signal Protocol from scratch.I'd like to hear what specific claims were made against any of these projects. Other than software patents, if your jurisdiction even recognizes such a thing, and specific laws, it's not illegal to implement a protocol, whether the spec is available or not. IIRC, Wire was accused of copyright infringement because their implementation (in a different programming language) looked too similar (!) to the OWS Java code. Note that the OWS code as well as Wire are GPL-licensed, so the dispute was over attribution only! I wonder why OWS were going after such a case at all. The ZINA case you mention sounds like a trademark claim for "Signal"? Anyway, reading such discussions lately, it seems to me that the propaganda term "intellectual property" has had exactly its desired effect: fear, uncertainty, and doubt about what anyone is allowed to do with "someone else's idea". -SMH
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