Hmmm... I think we would need a patent lawyer to opine on
what the ramifications are. Patent law is full of all sorts
of tricks and turns, it isn't like "ordinary" law where you
can use common sense.
Yes, I know it, JPEG, GIF, SCO things ... sigh, that's American way ;-<
The problem is that if we start using this algorithm, and it becomes
popular, then NTT can change their minds and start to go after
people.
NTT don't need to that as well as IBM don't need to that.
NTT is huge telephone company as well as old-"AT&T". There are only
one NTT's concerning thing that they protect themself.
I think their motivation is "standardization", not for sale patents.
NTT is #1 hardware buyer in Japan. They buy equipments multi-billion
dollars in every year. Another patenter of Camellia is Mitsubishi
Electric Corporation. Mitsubishi supplies security and military
systems to the goverment of Japan. Fair "standardization", I mean not
only American way but also more neutral way of standardization, is
required for it.
AES is defined as FIPS (Federal Information blah, blah, blah),
essentially no international standard. There is a some risk when US
start to export restriction. They need to make risk hedge by their
own way.
They push Camellia to ISO and it become ISO/IEC18033. They submited
it NESSIE in EU and CRYPTREC in Japan. RFCs also. This tactics
inherits from KASUMI by Mitsubshi for 3GPP cipher.
That's my opinion.
So, please let me know what we should get from NTT?
Fair use statement? (Sorry, I don't know what it is ;-)
If you show something that we need to get, I'll try to find it.
The licence to the source code is orthogonal to the patent
situation. The source code is not the invention.
That it correct. Potentially, that problem exists not only Camellia
code but also any code that we wrote.
To some extent, they tried to address this issue in GPL v3, I have
no idea how successfully...
I think they are easy to move from GPLv2 to GPLv3 when GPLv3 is
appeared because they have nothing to lose about it. And it will be
clear what they want to do.
At the last of the 5th International GPLv3 Conference at Tokyo,
Kanda-san who is a project leader of Camellia in NTT spoke about NTT
and Camellia team's contribution/efforts to FLOSS community.
If you want to know about what he talked, I'd like to ask Kanda-san
that he talk it again at rump session of CRYPTO2008.
Regards,
---
Hironobu SUZUKI <hironobu at h2np dot net><hironobu at fsij dot org>
Hironobu SUZUKI Office, Inc. / FSIJ / WCLSCAN / OpenPKSD
Tokyo, Japan.
http://h2np.net