Simply put, the public key approach did away with a major problem: how to send descrambling tools over networks if the information itself wasn’t secured. People who didn’t know each other could trade public keys, then share secrets from the start. They could even use the same software to verify their identities with the help of trusted third parties, who “signed” the keys with sequences of their own. Imagine the many possibilities for allowing safe business transactions on networks between strangers. A lucrative business just might await Zimmermann if he added his own wrinkles. With RSA, however, came a series of legal nightmares for Zimmermann. Starting work on his own software using RSA, he hadn’t any idea at the start that Rivert, Shamir, and Adleman would be claiming a patent on it. The trio farmed their rights out to RSA Data Security and, eventually, Public Key Partners. Jim Bidzos, negotiating for RSA, in many ways stood out as a political and philosophical opposite of Zimmermann. Bidzos carried a Greek passport for business reasons but at the same time felt patriotic enough to have volunteered for the U.S. Marines. The way Bidzos tells the story (to Simson Garfinkel, author of _PGP: Pretty Good Privacy_), Zimmermann asked for a “free license” for use of RSA. “When I told him ‘No,’” Bidzos said, “he was really upset. He told me that he was behind on his mortgage payments and that he had invested years in writing this piece of software.” Bidzos said he suggested that Zimmermann try licensing the patent from a larger company.[6.14] Zimmermann’s own side of the story differed starkly—in 1991 he wrote Jim Bidzos a letter saying that Bidzos and Ron Rivert had told him that “you would grant me a free license to make and sell products with your algorithm.”[6.15] A few years later he would note to the _Wall Street Journal_ that he hadn’t sold PGP before his contract with ViaCrypt, one of RSA’s licensees.[6.16] He steadfastly maintained he had not broken any laws. Many on the Internet would have agreed, if for no other reason than that they considered software patents to be abominations. Without patents to limit them, many programmers felt they could be more creative. Their ethos was quite in line with the traditional Net ethos. The predecessor of the Internet, after all, hadn’t just been started to allow the Pentagon to survive nukes. It also existed to share knowledge.