If RSA failed to attempt to protect their trademark in 1996,
then they will have no luck trying to protect their trademark now. If,
in fact, RSA did not claim trademark protection in 1996 then there is
absolutely no way any court will grant RSA any trademark protection
for RSA now and in the future.
I'm not a lawyer, but you don't need to be a lawyer to know
how to protect a trademark, and RSA did exactly the *wrong* thing to
protect their trademark.
It appears that in the first letter RSA is granting a license
to IEEE to use the word "RSA" in the context of the document. In doing
so, RSA is trying to claim that they actually have an enforceable
trademark on the term RSA. So they are not telling IEEE not to use the
"RSA" term. They are granting a license to IEEE to use the RSA term,
which license is of course not necessary.
The second letter grants a more broad license, because the
pcommunity was upset with the license granted in the first letter. The
correct response, however, is not to complain that the 2nd, more broad
license is not broad enough, but to realize that no license, implicit
or explicit, is necessary to use the mark RSA to describe the
algorithim.
Things like this have happened before, and the cryptography
community has won. I'm surprised that the community is rolling over so
fast this time. Has everyone gone soft in expectation of the patent
expiring? Has everyone forgotten about the fact that SSL is now
deployed worldwide in full-strength capability *hinges* upon the fact
that a non-RSA-source version of RC4 was in widespread use?
--
sameer
