On 6-okt-04, at 13:54, Scott W Brim wrote:
Maybe I'm being naive here, but it seems to me that
some kind of clue transfer from the IETF to the US patent office would
be beneficial to all except the patent lawyers who would then have to
start to do actual work to make a living.
The US patent office is overwhelmed, and acting like it's under a DoS
attack. I agree it would be great if we all offered technical
assistance, but not as the IETF. If needed we could create some other
organization. Let the IETF have a clear focus.
It's probably a good idea to keep the patent politics out of the IETF,
but if technical information flowing from the IETF to the US patent
office can reduce certain harmful effects to the IETF process, then it
would be a bad idea to forego this because the focus may get unclear.
I'm also unsure where the necessary level of competence can be found
outside the IETF.
It seems to me that simply uploading all drafts into the prior art
database wouldn't be a bad idea. (We now upgrade the DoS to DDoS.) And
if that's unfeasible, keeping those drafts around so that people who
are looking for prior art outside the patent databases can find them
would be a good start. (It could be argued that RFCs are the relevant
documents here, but since drafts exist long before RFCs of the same
content, drafts are better in this regard.)
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf