On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:12:18 +0200
Simon Josefsson <simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org> wrote:
The community needs to evaluate patent claims, and preferably reach
conservative agreement (rough consensus is not good enough) on whether
we should care about a particular patent or not. Input to that
community evaluation process may be documentation of legal actions
taken by a patent owner. Sometimes that may happen only after a
document has been published.
I would support down-grading standards track documents that later turn
out to be patent-infected to informational. Doing so would avoid
sending a message that the IETF supports patented technology, when the
IETF community didn't know about the patents at publication time. For
credibility of the process, I believe it is important that these
decisions are only made based on publicly available information.
To be consistent with IETF process and IPR policy, I think that the only
way to do that is via a "standards action" -- an IETF consensus call
(often preceeded by a WG discussion and last call) to downgrade the
document. Reclassifying documents as Historic is done by separate RFCs
-- I suspect that that's the mechanism that would have to be followed
here.
Look at it this way -- we give WGs the right to standardize encumbered
technologies. If we're to later reject technologies because they've
become encumbered, it's really a case of going through the same sort of
decision process.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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