Subject: [Asrg] MailFrontier and Patents

From: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 15:03:05 -0400

Below is a response about from MailFrontier regarding their opinion on 
patents and MailBlocks.

>From: <[email-masked]>
>To: "Yakov Shafranovich" <[email-masked]>
>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.

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