Almost everybody I know of that is doing real-world cryptography is using or preparing to use ECC. In one or two years I think the typical computer user will be using ECC very frequently. The ECC patents are pretty easy to work around. One very conservative approach is: don't use ECMQV, don't use point compression, only use the Suite B curves, and use Sun's ECC contribution to OpenSSL (as it was created with the benefit of Sun's legal department and probably also reviewed by several other companies), and review the math algorithms used to make sure they were all published before 1994.