“Are you familiar with public-key cryptography…?”

Whitfield Diffie took the stand in Texas on Friday in the courtroom face-off between Newegg and “patent-licensing giant” (i.e. patent troll) TQP Development, who has sued hundreds of companies saying it has patented the common Web encryption scheme of combining SSL with RC4.

Enjoy this exchange:

Lawyer: “We’ve heard a good bit in this courtroom about public-key encryption, are you familiar with that?”
Diffie: “Yes, I am.”
Lawyer: “And how is it that you’re familiar with public-key encryption?”
Diffie: “I invented it.”

See the full Ars Technica article.

UPDATE: Newegg lost!