I work for a Tech company and when we're deciding whether or not to use ECDSA found in OpenSSL for one of our new projects, the legal guy told us we couldn't use ECDSA from OpenSSL because, it contains ECC code that is patented by Certicom.

I did some searching and I did find that Certicom holds around 130 patents in the Elliptic Curve Cryptography area and that patented code is indeed in OpenSSL.

Questions:

Is Bitcoin infringing these patents? 

How about other people creating Apps for Bitcoin that use ECDSA?