> Horst Herb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > David Forslund wrote: > > I looked over the patent and don't understand how the patent was > > granted. There is much prior > > art in this area including standards from the OMG, where the > patient > > identifier (which can be > > I discussed this with Andrew some time ago. In fact we already used > this > separation of information in order to protect confidential data in > almost literally the same way as his patent in ~ 1986 (?, maybe even > earlier) at the Technical University of Munich for cardiol. study > data. > No paper was written re this method since we regarded this as a > marginal > detail and though it was something self-evident, prbably used long > before we implemented our own version.
The first description of these ideas I could find was by two sociologists at Uni of Pennsylvania, Cecil and Boruch, in 1979 in a very detailed technical report published as a monograph by their university. In the health field, those techniques and extensions to them using public key cryptography, which are very similar to those described in Andrew's patent, were detailed by Bernd Blobel and others in the context of German cancer registries and cancer treatment networks, in a series of papers in both German and English, published in teh medical literature between the late 1980s and 1996. All predate Andrew's patent application, I'm afraid. > > Won't be defensible at least in Europe, I'd expect. > > Anyway, doesn't matter: in Germany at that time, only *devices* were > patentable. No ideas, no algorithms, only concrete devices where you > could actually demonstrate a prototype. This reasonable principle has > > sadly been watered down in recent years. Yes indeed. Iwas shocked to learn that even methods of medical treatment are patentable now here in Australia. The whole world will soon be like the US patent office. It's a slowly evolving disaster for both scientific disiplines, and for global equity. Tim C
