[Cryptography] What is the state of patents on elliptic curve cryptography?

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 1:20 AM, Daira Hopwood <daira at jacaranda.org> wrote:

> On 20/08/13 19:26, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > It is almost certain that most uses of EC would not infringe the
> remaining patents.
> >
> > But the patent holder can force anyone attempting to use them to spend
> about $3-5 million
> > to defend their right to use EC and so there is very little incentive to
> do so given that
> > RSA 2048 is sufficient for almost any need.
>
> In principle there's no way to be sure of anything being free from
> patents, so why treat
> EC as a special case? Seems like you're just doing Certicom's
> FUD-spreading for them :-(
>

Given that I am an expert witness specialising in finding prior art for
patent defences, my original post was a statement against interest as I
would be in with a good shot of getting a $100K gig if someone did decided
to test patentability of EC.

There is no way to be sure that anything is free of patents, but in this
case we are pretty sure that there will be a suit.

This is not an exception to the usual approach either, quite a few of my
design proposals in IETF have been shot down as 'too clever', i.e. someone
might have filed a patent.

What worries me on the Certicom patents is whether the 20 year from filing
or 17 years from issue applies since they are continuations in part on a
filing made prior to 7 June 1995.


-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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