Simon,
I filed for patent (Jan and Sep 2005) and later promoted TLS authz (Feb
2006) in good faith. It is possible that the patent claims can be read more
broadly than I expected, but that's a fairly detailed and unresolved legal
question. I am working diligently to -- let me speak carefully -- explore
if and how I can make a royalty free license grant to ensure that promoting
TLS authz continues to be an act in good faith, while still protecting a way
for my company to make money on its IPR.
I have experienced some surprises when mixing law and Internet standards.
To try to avoid surprises, I have hired IPR attorneys at two different firms
to review my draft which proposes a royalty-free license grant. I expect
any resulting license will be conditioned upon IETF acceptance of TLS authz
as a standard. I hope to have concluded these services next week.
I think IPR questions are complicated in part because for some questions
only a lawsuit can answer the question -- but we should all want to stay
clear of these kinds of lawsuits! So answers seem to me to be in short
supply. I want to craft the proposed license to make this situation a
little clearer than that, but doing so often involves taking risks of giving
away a huge loophole. So I'm working to get good legal advice.
In short, I am working to create a royalty-free license grant -- hopefully I
can disclose it next week. With some luck, it will clarify the situation.
Best regards,
mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Josefsson [mailto:simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org]
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2007 10:12 AM
To: Sam Hartman
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org; iesg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org;
mark(_at_)redphonesecurity(_dot_)com
Subject: Re: Withdrawal of Approval and Second Last Call: draft-housley-
tls-authz-extns
Sam Hartman <hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> writes:
"Simon" == Simon Josefsson <simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org> writes:
Simon> I don't care strongly about the standards track status.
Simon> However, speaking as implementer of the protocol: If the
Simon> document ends up as informational or experimental, I
Simon> request that we make an exception and allow the protocol to
Simon> use the already allocated IANA protocol constants. That
Simon> will avoid interoperability problems. I know the numbers
Simon> are allocated from the pool of numbers reserved for
Simon> standards track documents. There is no indication that we
Simon> are running out of numbers in that registry. Thus, given
Simon> the recall, I think the IETF should be flexible and not
Simon> re-assign the IANA allocated numbers at this point just
Simon> because of procedural reasons.
Would you support publication on the standards track given the IPR
situation as someone who has implemented?
If the patent concern is valid and covers TLS libraries or other
applications, no.
However, as far as I am aware of the public information that is
available, the situation appears to be that we don't know whether
these patents apply and to what extent. I don't know whether the
patents were filed in good or bad faith. More information from the
patent holders may help here.
If it is possible to implement the protocol without violating the
patents, I would support publication. I've seen some claims that this
may be possible. I have no interest in reading these patents myself,
but my position would be influenced if someone knowledgeable reads the
patents.
Given the amount of patents out there, it would be unreasonable for us
to move everything to informational just because someone finds
something that may be relevant to a piece of work.
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.
/Simon
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