Kevin Connolly <kconnolly@EVW.COM> writes on cyberia-l forwarded to cpunks:
RSA Data Security, Inc. filed an action in the Superior Court of California, San Mateo County, against Pretty Good Privacy, Inc. PGP has been claiming that its license to distribute RSA-based encryption software is based on a chain running from Public Key Partners to Viacrypt, Inc. PGP acquired Viacrypt, Inc. in January 1996 and has been selling RSA-based encryption software for commercial use ever since. The complaint, filed by Tomlinson Zisko Morosoli & Maser, alleges that PGP's license is derived from a license to Lemcom, which in turn has been terminated.
This might well mean the end of PGP.
I don't think so. PGP has been standardising on El Gamal which is not covered by RSA's patents, for precisely the reason that RSA Inc has a bad record as a litigious patent worker. El Gamal is a variant of Diffie-Hellman, and the patents on Diffie-Hellman are set to expire RSN (later this year, Sept?) There is still the putative claim by RSA that they have a blanket patent covering `any public key system', but it sounds like they are not relying on this claim here. I think that the initial PGP products are using RSA, however I understood PGP is moving to El Gamal, where RSA is due to be relegated to a `for backwards compatibility only' feature. This suit will maybe accelerate this move away from RSA, and perhaps costs backwards compatibility. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`