IDEA License

[Werner Koch]

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:46, chaljan at gmail.com said:

> is the IDEA algorithm licensed? Under which conditions am I allowed to use
> the idea extension in a commercial product?

I assume your question is: Is the IDEA algorithm patented?

It was patented and this was one or the main reasons to develop GnuPG as
the free PGP replacement.

Meanwhile the patent expired:

 * Patents on IDEA have expired:
 *   Europe: EP0482154 on 2011-05-16,
 *   Japan:  JP3225440 on 2011-05-16,
 *   U.S.:   5,214,703 on 2012-01-07.

Thus if you have to decrypt old data you may now use a decent GnuPG
versions to do that (1.4.13 or 2.x along an appropriate Libgcrypt
version).


Salam-Shalom,

   Werner

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