US Pat #4,200,770 Diffie Hellman public key exchange
There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of good software patents out of the 500,000 or so that have been issued.
We'd all be much better off without any software patents at all but it's not true that they are all fraudulent and abusive like the ones in these lawsuits. A small fraction are decent. Of course the innovations involved in those few patents would all have been discovered and published without patents as an incentive, because that's how software works.
But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear that either of the public-key crypto patents qualifies. In each case, the inventors included academics (Hellman was on Stanford's faculty) whose job is to innovate and disclose their own innovations. (And while it's common these days for academics to patent and try to monetize at the same time, that wasn't always so. It was rarer, and sometimes controversial, in the 1970s.)
The RSA patent made R, S, and A very rich --- but it isn't clear what it did for the rest of us.
US Pat #4,200,770 Diffie Hellman public key exchange
There are literally dozens, maybe hundreds of good software patents out of the 500,000 or so that have been issued.
We'd all be much better off without any software patents at all but it's not true that they are all fraudulent and abusive like the ones in these lawsuits. A small fraction are decent. Of course the innovations involved in those few patents would all have been discovered and published without patents as an incentive, because that's how software works.