Below is a response about from MailFrontier regarding their opinion on
patents and MailBlocks.
From: <*******(_at_)mailfrontier(_dot_)com>
To: "Yakov Shafranovich" <research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com>
Subject: Re: Your challenge/response technology for stopping spam.
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 09:52:32 -0700
Organization: MailFrontier, Inc.
Yakov,
First, regarding the mailblocks lawsuit, I probably shouldn't comment on it
since it is a legal matter.
Regarding challenge-response patents, MailFrontier does have a few pending
patents. The general concept of challenge-response has been around a while.
For example, here is a reference to it from 1996:
http://groups.google.ca/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=56luge246on%40bertrand.ccs.carleton.ca
MailFrontier's patents are not so much about challenge-response itself, but
rather in regard to specific ways of doing challenge-response. For various
legal and business reasons, I can't divulge too many details about them.
However, I will try to give you a brief synopsis of them:
1. Protects the way that our Matador email client does challenge-response.
This involves the use of image challenges, HTTP and automatic whitelisting
if the challenge is answered correctly.
2. Protects some new ways to do challenges that we are working on, but have
not been released in a product yet. For business reasons, I can't say much
more about these.
MailFrontier strongly supports standardization of challenge/response, and if
there is a patent issue, we are open to licensing our patents under RAND
(Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory) terms.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg