The general cryptographic community was initially not aware of the potential backdoor, until of Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson 2007 rediscovery, or of Certicom's Daniel R. L. Brown and Scott Vanstone's 2005 patent application describing the backdoor mechanism.
On May 30, 2007, Certicom filed a lawsuit against Sony in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Marshall office, claiming that Sony's use of ECC in Advanced Access Content System and Digital Transmission Content Protection violates Certicom's patents for that cryptographic method.