Also, in the same sphere, RSA. But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear th

Also, in the same sphere, RSA. But the rationale for the patent system is to encourage innovation that wouldn't have happened without it, and it isn't clear that either of the public-key crypto patents qualifies. In each case, the inventors included academics (Hellman was on Stanford's faculty) whose job is to innovate and disclose their own innovations. (And while it's common these days for academics to patent and try to monetize at the same time, that wasn't always so. It was rarer, and sometimes controversial, in the 1970s.) The RSA patent made R, S, and A very rich --- but it isn't clear what it did for the rest of us.