Elliptic curves, patent status?

[Wei Dai]

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