On Mon, Sep 20, 2021 at 08:41:21PM +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Mon, 20 Sep 2021, Robin H Johnson wrote:
> 
> > RedHat's legal team clearly know something there that they aren't
> > disclosing the details of publicly, because the patches said the
> > patents expire in 2020, but when I asked off-list if EC could be
> > re-enabled based on the expiry dates in the files, they claimed that
> > patent issues were still present, without giving any detail.
> 
> If there are remaining patent issues then they should be able to support
> their claim by facts, like a patent number. Why would this be difficult,
> or what reason would they have not to disclose it?
I don't have any answer from them, but my own research did turn up a few
current patents around EC (sorted by expiry):

US8462944B2 exp 2021-12-26
US8189772B2 exp 2023-05-28
US9160530B2 exp 2024-10-28
US8213605B2 exp 2025-11-14
US10756893B2 exp 2026-01-23
US10284370B2 exp 2026-03-03
US20100023775A1 exp 2031-08-02
US8631240B2 exp 2031-08-02
US8572367B2 exp 2031-12-25
US8918648B2 exp 2032-01-31
US10079673B2 exp 2032-02-15 ** not specifically EC, more general about Entropy
US9800418B2 exp 2035-07-17

IANAL, but the difficult question is: does any open-source end up
implementing those algorithms?

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Dev, Infra Lead, Foundation Treasurer
E-Mail   : robbat2@gentoo.org
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