On Wednesday, September 01, 2004 5:18 PM, mazieres(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com wrote:
On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 19:28:32 -0400, Yakov Shafranovich
<research(_at_)solidmatrix(_dot_)com> wrote:
A few comments. First of all, we do not know whether the IPR claims
extend to SPF classic or not.
You are correct that we don't know whether SPF or SPF2 is
covered by pending patent claims from Microsoft. However, we
*do* know that any such claims are *not* covered by
Microsoft's license agreement. Thus, even if we were to
adopt Sender ID as the standard, should Microsoft
subsequently be granted a patent covering the SPF2 record
format, it would no longer be possible to deploy Sender ID
without a new license from Microsoft.
If, at this point, sender ID were derailed by a patent from
Microsoft over SPF, I think this would pretty clearly
demonstrate bad faith on Microsoft's part. Since we have
been instructed to assume good faith on the part of all
parties, I think this means operating under the assumption that:
1) The pending patent rights granted by Microsoft's Sender ID
agreement are sufficient to deploy Sender ID (at least for
the subset of software authors who find the conditions of the
agreement acceptable), and therefore
2) Microsoft does not have any pending claims over the SPF
record format.
So yes, anybody, even Microsoft, might have patent claims
that might prohibit just about any recommendation of the
MARID working group.
But we still have to make progress, and the best we can do is
deal with the most likely scenario, which is that Microsoft
probably has applied for patents, that the patents probably
cover the portions of Sender ID they have offered to
license--namely the pra and or core documents--and finally
that until we have more information, none of the MARID
proposals is any more or less likely to be affected by
third-party patent holders.
Our IPR disclosure filed with the IETF and available at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/microsoft-ipr-draft-ietf-marid-core.txt is
quite specific and covers the marid-core and marid-pra specs used in
combination. That's all. We do not, to the best of my knowledge, have
any IPR claims related to either marid-protocol, which describes the
SPF2 record format, or marid-submitter.