Sued For Using HTTPS: Companies In Crypto Patent Fight (theregister.co.uk)

yoink! writes: According to an article in The Register, corporations big and small are coming under legal fire from CryptoPeak. The Company holds U.S. Patent 6,202,150, which describes "auto-escrowable and auto-certifiable cryptosystems" and has claimed that the Elliptic Curve Cryptography methods/implementations used as part of the HTTPS protocol violates their intellectual property. Naturally, reasonable people disagree.

Comments

NeXTStep had ECC...

[mlts]

In 1991, NeXTStep had ECC encryption for E-mail in version 3.0 (called FastECC.) If there were a patent made then, it definitely would be expired by now.

Re:When will enough be enough?

[Amouth]

IBM has you covered, a Patent on how to be a patent troll

http://www.google.com/patents/...

And for good measure Halliburton has a patent on how to patent someone else's invention and gain control of it

http://www.google.com/patents/...

Corporate death penalty

[Anonymous Coward]

While I'm totally against personal death penalty, there should be a corporate death penalty, where a company is completely disbanded: its assets (yeah, the investor's and bank's too!) are confiscated and put towards public good. Naturally just for a particularly outrageous behaviour, but patent trolls seem to fit the bill.

This way investors would have to make sure they check the moral side of their investment (and not only the financial).

I'm not a believer in the Invisible Hand, mind you -- but lobbyism, nepotism and too much corporate power is obstructing the few good things it *could* reasonably do.

Re:Corporate death penalty

[jpatters]

I would advocate replacing the current practice of corporations being legally required to act in the best interests of shareholders only with a new hierarchy or rules, much like Asimov's laws if you will:

First, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of the general public.
Second, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of their employees where it doesn't conflict with the first rule.
Third, a corporation must act reasonably in the best interest of their shareholders where that doesn't conflict with the first or second rule.

A corporation jacks up the price of a generic drug by 7,000,000%? Sued by the general public.

A corporation informs employees that they will have to train their H1B replacements? Sued by their employees.

A corporation pays its CEO an unreasonably large salary with no evidence that that results in better executive performance? Sued by their shareholders. (This should be happening now...)

I like it better than a corporate death penalty, because many corporations do have value and importance to the general public that would be at risk of being destroyed because of a single bad acting CEO. With this scheme, the courts would have a framework for redressing these issues.

In the case of patent trolls, some patents are more obviously bullshit then others. The more obviously bullshit the patent, the more strong a case members of the general public would have to individually sue the trolls for obstructing their use of the technology. What if everybody who uses HTTPS could sue these clowns?