!071294 Two government actions involving patent royalties Two federal patent royalty items of note. The first is that the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is heading the federal government's efforts for the infamous Clipper ship encryption effort (something that is controversial for a variety of reasons), has agreed to pay royalties to an MIT professor because of patents relating to the chip. Silvio Micali, a computer scientist at MIT, has two patents that cover key aspects of Clipper technology, and NIST figured it was less of a headache to licence his patents than to dispute the issue in court. I think this is a mistake for a variety of reasons. First, NIST could have first asked the Patent Office to reexamine Micali's patents. Encryption, like many other software concepts, is a field with tons of prior art that the PTO examiners barely sample. Maybe a couple of claims could have been thrown out, weakening Micali's patents. Personally, I would rather not see the government attacking patent holders (though the Hughes case shows there is not much to fear), but if the government is going to force a standard like Clipper, it should try to find a way to do so without infringing on patents it has to license. Given that Clipper is already flawed, along with the patent liability and general opposition to Clipper, maybe NIST could have gone back to the drawing boards. ==== The second item is that the National Institutes of Health has agreed to give more royalties from sales of AIDS testing kits to the French Institut Pasteur. As you may remember, there has been a big controversy in the AIDS world for many years (even subject of part of a commercial movie - don't we need more patent movies :-) about who discovered the AIDS virus. In the US, Robert Gallo claimed to have done so, while the French lab argued that he did so with samples they provided to him. Not to bore you with the endless debates that have gone on for many years (the general consensus being that Gallo is guilty of misconduct, though a US government inquiry found nothing amiss), but in 1987 the two sides agreed to split the royalties. Since then there has been an imbalance of payments, which this new agreement addresses. ==== The July 12 1994 Technology & Health section of the Wall Street Journal, as well as the July 12 New York Times have nice articles on these stories. Greg Aharonian Internet Patent News Service