"using a shared seed value"
Must be an Apple seed.
A patent holding firm has made it its business to sue just about every tech firm anyone has heard of in its quest to make money from an encryption patent, it has emerged. In the last four years, TQP Development has kept its lawyers busy with complaints against hundreds of companies, including big boys of tech like Google, …
Shared Seed??? what about "code" of the day/hour/minute combined with time of the day to ensure channels hop in synch in secure radio systems? The also used "shared" keys for encryption/decryption of data transmitted over these secure data links... IT'S NOT NEW... I've been using Crypto Fill Guns for loading codes into systems since the early eighties...
anyroad... I believe there's loads of eggheads in secret government departments that could easily find prior art used in secure government comms between parties...
The amusing part is that by the same logic, this troll could also sue the USPTO for infringement:
https://efs.uspto.gov/efile/portal/home
Now that would be funny...
"patent for using a shared seed value to generate pseudo-random key values at transmitter and receiver"
Not sure you could call a Caesar cypher a key for a pseudo random number generator (PRNG) - the original cypher was a simple alphabetic shift (like ROT13).
However, I think you could consider the rotors and plug-boards of an Enigma machine to be a PRNG, so prior art goes back at least to the 1930s.
Also we have the Lorenz SZ40, SZ41 and SZ42 cypher machines (known as 'Tunny' by Bletchley Park) from 1941 onwards which encrypted binary teleprinter data.
A more modern example is taken from 'Atomic Theory and Practice' (the manual for the Acorn Atom, released 1980) - section 8.4.2 contains a program that seeds the Atom random number generator to encrypt and decrypt strings - seems to be pretty much prior art.
Interesting that alot of patents seem these days have prior art in some film or TV series. Which hollywood let slip though there fingers as they are too busy making sure you have paid for every 27 versions of Star Wars in full.
Still there realy should be some limitations as often the case they let the guilty carry on until they have built up a large market and then apply for a large backdate. If you hold a patent and some company abuses it without paying and are starting up do you go for them on day one or do you wait until they are worth sueing. That in many ways is why they are called trolls. Maybe they could limit backdate of moneys due to the date the complaint is filled or the date they were pointed out they were in violation. That would make things less silly in a silly system.
I would say I'm going to make you a one time offer of $1. We settle, sign an NDA for the settlement and you can say we paid a licence fee. If you reject this offer we go to court and we will disclose everything about the case as we go. If you loose you we will counter sue for all costs. How would you like the dollar, cash or cheque?
This leaves them with a tricky situation. If they say no its going to get expensive. If they say yes they can hope the next fool pays up. The next victim should then use the same tactic.
Probably a flaw in the plan but looks like a starter for 10.
And they'd probably reply "We'll see you in court then. We didn't file this case in East Texas for the barbeque you know..."
Then during the trial they'll cry and whine/whinge to the jury that mean-old Google wouldn't play ball and were very rude. And before you can say "software shouldn't be patentable," Google is on the hook for a couple hundred million. Better to just toss a couple million at them and put the whole thing behind an NDA.
If you're a small company, yes. If you're Google that might be quicker, but in the long run I think they'd be better fighting, winning, counter-suing for fees and defamation, and publicizing it along the way. Which they could easily do. Yes, it might cost them more than the couple mill to settle this suit until they get their money back (or they could opt to leave the last part off and write it off as cost of business), but the next time a troll comes along they'll think twice before suing Google, 'cause losing will hurt in a very public way. And that reduces their chances of trolling others. Eventually we might get back to a decent balance between the need to reward innovative thinkers and the public good.
Lawyers for the most part are the leeches of the corporate world. Most of the people who make the laws are also lawyers who have a vested interest in creating as many billable hours as possible that must be paid in full in order to avoid something bad happening to you (higher taxes, patent suits, etc).
its amazing that these companies have enough money to keep dishing out on senseless things, unless they actually are outright stealing it, makes you wonder why no one just invested in a hitman for companies like this if there ethics are already corrupt enough to steal, why not go one step farther.