At 11:49 PM 7/28/98 +0200, Ulf Möller wrote:
Schnorr makes a plausible argument that DSA is covered by his patent
(see http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/1363/letters/SchnorrMar98.html),
and his European and Japanese patent claims are broader than the US
one. That probably means that there is no restriction to hardware
implementations in these patents.
RSA is the licensor of the Schnorr patents. When asked about this, they
have made no claims that these patents apply to DSA. If you read Schnorr's
letter carefully, he doesn't really either. He says "The above mentioned
patents apply to various implementations of ...". It appears that he
believes that you can implement DSA without infringing on his patent, but
various things you do can cause you to infringe. This is similar to many
other companies' "improvement patents".
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium