29-09-2012, 02:45 PM
The RSA Patent
ABSTRACT
Anyone who "makes, uses, offers to sell or sells" a patented invention without the permission of the patent owner can be liable for patent infringement.[11] The boundaries of the patent are defined in the claims portion of the patent.[12] Accordingly, in order to determine whether a particular product, method or process infringes a patent, one must start with the text of the claims themselves.
There are 40 claims in the RSA Patent, but only ten of them are independent claims.[13] Independent claims are claims which do not incorporate other claims by reference. To infringe a dependent claim, one must first infringe the independent claim (or claims) incorporated by reference in the dependent claim. Conversely, if one does not infringe the independent claim(s) incorporated by the dependent claim, by definition one does not infringe the dependent claim. Accordingly, a review of the independent claims in the RSA Patent is sufficient for purposes of this discussion. As we will also see, a detailed review of the broadest independent claim in the RSA Patent (Claim 23) will lead without much further ado to a logical conclusion about the other nine independent claims, and in turn to a conclusion about all the claims in the RSA Patent: that none of these claims are infringed by performing a typical digital signature verification.