DTI White Paper on Export Control

Tue, 07 Jul 1998 03:34:35 -0500

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In <199807070714.IAA20924@argo.demon.co.uk>, on 07/07/98 
   at 08:14 AM, Paul Ashton <paul@argo.demon.co.uk> said:

>> In message <nlhYJSAlXVo1EwbN@reporters.net>, T Bruce Tober
>> >Showing what total incompetent, unknowledgable idiots they are. We all
>> >know (and so do they) that pgp is the de facto standard around the
>> >world.

>> I wish it were. The problem is that PGP is licensed outside the US only
>> for non-commercial use. It is not clear to me that th ecompany which
>> owns it can or will license its use by commercial organisations outside
>> the US. I would be very pleased to hear that they did provide such
>> licences.

>See http://www.pgpinternational.com/product/bus-sec.html for information
>on buying PGP for commercial use outside the US.

>Alternatively, you can (or could) buy IDEA licences direct from the
>patent holder and use the freely available PGP sources. That was our
>belief to be sufficient to legally use PGP in the UK.

While this will cover you on the patent issues as far as the algorithms
are concerned you are forgetting the most important part: The copyrights
on the PGP code itself! The license for the freely distributed source code
clearly states that it is for non-commercial use. Using it outside this
context is a clear violation of that copyright.

Now this may be something that has been overlooked in the past for various
reasons, no commercial product available overseas, PGP Inc. was a small
benevolent company that had neither the resources not the desire to pursue
such violations. Neither of these are true now. A commercial version *is*
available in Europe. NAI is a very large corporations.

Honestly, PGP is cheap and there is no excuse for a business not to pay
for it.

- -- 
- ---------------------------------------------------------------
William H. Geiger III  http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii
Geiger Consulting    Cooking With Warp 4.0

Author of E-Secure - PGP Front End for MR/2 Ice
PGP & MR/2 the only way for secure e-mail.
OS/2 PGP 5.0 at: http://users.invweb.net/~whgiii/pgp.html
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