Elliptic curves, patent status?

[Anonymous]

Wei Dai (weidai at 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.