IDEA patent vs the recent USPTO memorandum

[David Shaw]

On Sep 16, 2009, at 1:56 PM, M.B.Jr. wrote:

> Hi list,
> I've recently had access to this document, written by the "United
> States Patent and Trademark Office" (USPTO) which basically tries to
> ban software patents.
>
> The memorandum is here:
> http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/2009-08-25_interim_101_instructions.pdf
>
> the case is,
> I'm really interested in reading your opinions of what this could mean
> to optional OpenPGP ciphers like IDEA.

Whether this means IDEA is okay or not patent-wise, I have a slightly  
different take on this: who cares about IDEA at this point?  IDEA was  
good back in the 90s and PGP 2.x.  It's 2009 now, and we have better  
ciphers than IDEA, a massive installed software base that doesn't use  
IDEA, and nobody is suffering for the lack of IDEA.  If IDEA was  
suddenly not patented, none of this would change.

David