Patent Issues
MDC-2 was covered by U.S. Patent 4,908,861, issued on March 13, 1990 but filed by IBM on August 28, 1987.
For this reason, support for MDC-2 has been disabled in OpenSSL on most Linux distributions and is not implemented by many other cryptographic libraries.
But the maximum lifespan of 20 years from filing date means that the U.S. Patent 4,908,861 could not have lasted beyond August 28, 2007 ; in fact it has expired in 2002, because IBM has not paid the renewal fee. The same goes for the Canadian patent. There is no patent for Europe.
This means that MDC2 can be freely used.
Read more about this topic: MDC-2
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