A few of these people didn't seem to do much research. There's not only one patent on ECC: there's around 130 esp by Certicom with a whole wikipedia article [1] dedicated to the topic. The early NSA patents are indeed expired while the linked Certicom patents seem to be in effect. Article also mentions Bernstein's might be exempt but anyone following patent troll suits won't be assured by that. Certicom loosing the lawsuit against Sony's high-priced lawyers with some prior art is somewhat assuring. Yet, it's a fact that ECC in certain forms (or in general?) is patented and even Schneier was disturbed by how well the patents were written.

So, next time ECC patents come up, those replying like they don't exist hopefully will not mislead HN readers again. (sdevlin's fair comment being an exception) I mean, if there are no patents, we wouldn't have people griping about licensing costs [2] or companies dropping $100+mil on the company for its ECC patents, would we?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_patents

[2] http://seekingalpha.com/article/2554945-blackberry-make-cert...