Re: [Cfrg] Patents and the new elliptic curves

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

I am not a lawyer. But even if I was, I would not be your lawyer. And
that makes a huge difference.

Expecting any party to issue a free legal opinion on this subject is
futile. Microsoft, Google and all the major companies have spent
several billion dollars in the past few years on settlements and
damages in a long list of patent suits, most of which are utterly
devoid of any merit whatsoever.

One of the patent cases I was involved in was based on a particularly
twisted interpretation of a patent claim that the patent examiner had
specifically excluded in the patent prosecution history.

My concern here is not the risk of a lawsuit against my employer, it
is the risk of a lawsuit against my customers.


That said, the ECC patents are very different to the usual software
patents. These are not 'do it on the Internet' type 'inventions' and
they aren't submarine patents with claims on stuff invented by other
people in continuations after the application was first filed. These
are patents making claims about very specific inventions. And the
original patents on the principal inventions were filed between 1985
and 1990.