MIT/RSA license documents available

More information has come out in the court case(s) between RSA and Cylink.
In particular, the license between MIT and RSA, which gives RSA the
exclusive rights to license the RSA patent, and its various amendments
over the years, are all available from the US District Court for
the Northern District of Calif.

For some reason, this court is in Oakland rather than in SF where
other cases in the Northern District are held.  The judge is Claudia
Wilken and it's case #94-2332-CW.  The license and amendments are in
the Attachments to document #15 ("Declaration of Robert B.
Foughner...")  and are all stamped "RSA DATA SECURITY CONFIDENTIAL"
just for fun.

In document #20, D. James Bidzos declares, under penalty of perjury,
"On or about August 4, 1994, I received a telephone call from a
customer of PKP.  In this conversation, he told me that he had
reviewed a copy of Cylink's complaint against RSA on an Internet
Bulletin Board.  Since then, I have myself reviewed Cylink's complaint
against RSA on the Internet, as well as copies of RSA's motions to
dismiss and to stay the arbitration.

"When I entered the Agreement of Intent with Cylink in April of 1990
on behalf of RSA, I understood that all disputes respecting the patent 
licensing business we had established in PKP would be arbitrated.  I
entered this arbitration agreement, in part, to ensure the disputes
between RSA and Cylink over the MIT patents would remain private,
since the two companies were jointly licensing those patents to third
parties.  Since Cylink went outside the arbitration agreement and
filed this lawsuit in federal court, I have received at least 25
communications (by telephone call, E-mail message, letter, fax, or
face to face discussion) about the dispute.  I have been asked
repeatedly how PKP could license a patent when one of PKP's partners
believes the patent is invalid.

"This public federal court action filed by Cylink to invalidate the
MIT patent has been very damaging to both RSA and the PKP partnership
as a whole.  I do not believe that I can clear my company RSA's good
name, or that of PKP unless Cylink's broad and insistent demands for a
license to use the MIT patent are also litigated in public."

So, even Jim seems to think that spreading this information is a good
idea.  If somebody (the Information Liberation Front?) wants to scan
this stuff in, I'll be glad to provide a Web/FTP site where people can
get it.

	John

gnu@toad.com writes
> "This public federal court action filed by Cylink to invalidate the
> MIT patent has been very damaging to both RSA and the PKP partnership
> as a whole.[...]"

Whoopee!

In case there are some cypherpunks not familiar with the situation:


The people who founded public key cryptography took out patents
on various methods, patents that were entirely legitimate and
justified.

All of these various patents got together under a single 
partnership which then made the dubious claim to own
*all* methods of public key cryptography, even methods such
as the square root method which are substantially different
from those developed by the patent holders.

Those who make such a claim deserve to be afflicted
with a plague of locusts and lawyers.

-- 
 ---------------------------------------------------------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our
property, because of the kind of animals that we        James A. Donald
are.  True law derives from this right, not from
the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.            jamesd@acm.org