Re: Elliptic curves, patent status?

At 05:16 PM 11/28/95 -0400, Michael Smith wrote:
>
> I'm unclear about the patent status of elliptic curve 
> systems. Are they covered by the Diffie-Hellman patent? 
> That is, is the lnguage of this patent broad enough to 
> cover _all_ public-key systems, regardless of their 
> mathematical basis? 

No, but RSA will litigate you with the objective of
inflicting extravagant legal costs regardless.

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On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, James A. Donald wrote:

> > [are there patents that cover all public key cryptography?]
>
> No, but RSA will litigate you with the objective of
> inflicting extravagant legal costs regardless.

RSADSI no longer owns the Stanford patents (Hellman-Merkel, 
Diffie-Hellman) which they used to claim covered all public key 
cryptography.  Those patents now belong to Cylink, who seems to be less 
litigious.

Wei Dai

Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com) wrote:
> On Mon, 27 Nov 1995, James A. Donald wrote:
>
> > > [are there patents that cover all public key cryptography?]
> >
> > No, but RSA will litigate you with the objective of
> > inflicting extravagant legal costs regardless.
>
> RSADSI no longer owns the Stanford patents (Hellman-Merkel, 
> Diffie-Hellman) which they used to claim covered all public key 
> cryptography.  Those patents now belong to Cylink, who seems to be less 
> litigious.

Especially considering that they might lose the patents in a court case
next month.