Re: [Patents] RSA patents in EP limelight

["P.L.Hayes" <paul@wolfbone.ath.cx>]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 23:20:30 +0200
Holger Blasum <holgerlists@blasum.net> wrote:

>  One obvious line of attack of course is that this was 
>  research by academics who would have done without the patent 
>  too (just to get published) and that it was in the air at that
>  time (eg Pohlig/Hellman).

Quite frankly I am sick of even anti-software patent programmers often saying
how patent-worthy the RSA algorithm is. It was my discovery of that patent and
the DHT patent that shocked and angered me enough to join mailing lists like
this one, sign petitions etc. in the first place. If it had been the one-click
and tabbed palette patents I am sorry to have to say that I probably wouldn't
have been enraged enough to investigate further; merely amused.

The RSA patent is a patent on the obvious and natural algorithm(s) derived
immediately from the simple lemma of elementary number theory discovered by
Cocks. It is utterly disgusting and outrageous that there could exist such a
patent and that anyone (but especially mathematicians) would even contemplate
patenting mathematics in this way. I hear Hartley regretted the patent on the
DHT and he may be forgiven. Rivest, Shamir and Adelman have no such regrets as
far as I know and if that is the case then they are a disgrace to their art.

I suggest that someone from the FFII puts up a web-page with a
counter-exhibition satire showing Cocks's lemma and the RSA algorithm derived
from it next to e.g. the division theorem and Euclid's algorithm. If one
deserves a patent then so does the other.