Was the patent really necessary, though? Wiki even mentions that it was only patentable in the US because of prior art, and likely would have been unpatentable if all extant prior art were known.
If anything, this seems like an example that argues the insufficiency of patents. If you invent something as important as RSA, you should be rewarded with a kingdom— and the information should be freely available to everyone. I'm not sure our compromise is doing the trick.
(I'm actually opposed to most software patents, so take this outlier as I do: a strange case that bears further consideration.)
This patent is definitely the kind of novel, amazing discovery that we want to reward.
Yes, the authors filed for a patent after their work was originally published [0], so they lost their international patents on a technicality. Yes, another scientist may [1] have secretly discovered the same thing, filing it away in classified documents, but by definition, "prior art" has been "made available to the public" [2].
Nonetheless, here are some important facts: first, if it weren't for this work, ecommerce would have been delayed for an unknowable amount of time. Second, if it weren't for this kind of fantastically profitable outcome, MIT (the original patent holder) would be hundreds of millions of dollars poorer.
[0] The wiki is misleading. It says "Since a paper describing the algorithm had been published in August 1977..." but it turns out that the referenced paper was on RSA itself, written by a pop science author. From the reference: "RSA was first presented to the public by Martin Gardner, in an article in Scientific American in August 1977."
[1] The wiki cites no source for this fact, so I can't compare the algorithms.
If anything, this seems like an example that argues the insufficiency of patents. If you invent something as important as RSA, you should be rewarded with a kingdom— and the information should be freely available to everyone. I'm not sure our compromise is doing the trick.