Patently wrong---hunting down critics
A new corporate trick threatens legal action for patent violations against a security researcher attempting to demonstrate how insecure RFID chips really are.
These chips are starting to pop up everywhere from toll road payment devices to building access cards and by the end of next year, in all American passports. Eventually they will replace bar codes and become the major source of inventory control for retail.
I've seen (or at least read about) several demonstrations where security researchers proved that these chips can be read at a greater distance than claimed by proponents and that they can be cloned or hacked. This becomes quite important, because once a billion of these little buggers become deployed in everything from blue jeans to I Dream of Jeannie tapes, it'll be too late to pull them back.
Wired reports that a prominent maker of RFID chips, HID Global, is taking the unusual step of issuing a cease-and-desist letter to a researcher named Chris Paget, who was preparing to demonstrate a method of cloning RFID building access cards at the Black Hat DC conference. Their grounds? They are claiming that cloning a card violates their patent.
I'd like to make the joke that this is patently absurd, but it's more serious than that. As author Jennifer Granick from Stanford rightly points out, this suggests a great way to stifle dissent against corporations---defensively patent the kinds of devices that can be used to monitor the problems with the primary technology.
Granick gives the farfetched example of tobacco companies patenting devices that measure the health effects of smoking. I think that that might be difficult because in the world of organic science and I suppose taxidermy, there's more than one way to skin a cat. But the effect on computer tech could be chilling, because there's usually only way to access digital devices because of protocol and specified interactive data exchange (handshaking).
It would be quite feasible for tech companies to use this technique to not only suppress competition, but also criticism, and that is clearly not what patents were intended to be used for.
As I've written before and probably will again, intellectual property law has gotten out of control in this country. What else can you expect when you have a large group of educated, litigious and detail-oriented fussbudgets getting to write all of the rules? IP lawyers. It's like playing chess with people who get to redefine how a knight moves throughout the game, optimizing on whatever is most convenient to them.
Congress should be protecting us from this. Why aren't they, I wonder? Don't we pay them enough?
Posted on February 28, 2007