Re: The trademark issue

[dkaplan@terra-nova.fr (Daniel Kaplan)]

A (At) 23:04 8/12/96, Kent Crispin ecrivait (wrote):

>All the technical solutions for a protocol to support this require
>some kind of strong authentication -- if a company in France, for
>example, wanted to create miel.com, 1) it would have to be sure that
>some other registry somewhere else wasn't also creating miel.com at
>the same time, and 2) *all* the registries have to be sure that
>the only they can add new names -- if a message arrives from France
>saying it's the registry and it wants to create miel.com, then they
>have to be sure that the message is from who it claims to be.
>
>The only methods to do these things involve strong cryptography, and
>I understand that France has fairly restrictive laws regarding use of
>cryptography.  The question is, are the French laws such that it
>would be impossible for a private company to become a registry for
>.com, because of the fact that it would require using software with
>strong cryptographic algorithms?

The French situation is not yet absolutely clear, but this is what our
(new) law seems to say:
- the use of cryptography for authentication in free
- this has nothing to do with the strength of the algorithm; it can be as
strong as needed
- if cryptography is used for confidentiality (ie, encrypting the body of a
message, not just signatures ou hashes), then some kind of key escrow
system will have to be used (but nobody yet knows what kind).

Daniel

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Daniel KAPLAN           dkaplan@terra-nova.fr
Consultant  -  Media & Commerce Electroniques
            -  Electronic  Commerce  &  Media
Tel/Fax +33 (0)1-4217 0754 GSM  06 09810 0377
    61 rue Monge - 75005 PARIS - France
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