On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 07:47:36PM -0500, Steve Sheldon wrote: > > Anyway, I don't see anything necessarily wrong with people at a university > taking work done there and cashing in as long as they don't have some unfair > advantage over others. Meaning, the work that was done at the University > has been published and available to all on equal terms. My point is, the RSA algorithm was developed "by" the universities of the professors involved, and thus if anyone has a right to the patents of that work, it should be the universities. It's really no different than using the facilities of your employer to work on an invention; it's not your invention if you needed your employer's facilities and your time on the job to do it. Certainly I don't have a problem with, say, Eric Brewer going out and founding Inktomi based on research done at Cal; he's not suing everyone who wants to make a web crawler. -Tom