Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin => Legal => Topic started by: operezm on April 22, 2015, 09:37:18 PM



Title: Bitcoin ECDSA patent infringement?
Post by: operezm on April 22, 2015, 09:37:18 PM
I work for a Tech company and when we're deciding whether or not to use ECDSA found in OpenSSL for one of our new projects, the legal guy told us we couldn't use ECDSA from OpenSSL because, it contains ECC code that is patented by Certicom.

I did some searching and I did find that Certicom holds around 130 patents in the Elliptic Curve Cryptography area and that patented code is indeed in OpenSSL.

Questions:

Is Bitcoin infringing these patents? 

How about other people creating Apps for Bitcoin that use ECDSA?
 


Title: Re: Bitcoin ECDSA patent infringement?
Post by: Bitco on April 23, 2015, 12:50:07 AM
The idea of elliptic curve crypto, and the NIST digital signature algorithm have been around for more than 20 years, and predate any unexpired patents.

What features of OpenSSL, specifically, are you using that might be covered by patents?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents