It seems I made a mistake and did not notice that chairs did not say that
we should not work alternatives AT ALL but said that we should not work
on alternatives that WOULD BE covered by patent application.
The above is appropriate, however I note that chairs said that we should
not work on alernatives that "reasonably thought to be covered by the
patent application". My objection still stands that in itself is
meaningless because we'll know if alernative is covered when there
would be another IPR disclosure as it relates to such possible alernative
draft. Until there is one, we can not reasonable be expected to know what
would be covered by patent application because we have not seen one!
On Sat, 11 Sep 2004, william(at)elan.net wrote:
3) On the issue of ignoring patent claims, the working group has at
least rough consensus that the patent claims should not be ignored.
Actually I have not seen rough consensus that patent claims should not be
ignored, but I don't think there was consensus that they should be ignored
either (not until we can read the actual patent), so we're still in limbo.
Additionally, there is at least rough consensus that the participants
of the working group cannot accurately describe the specific claims of
the patent application. This stems from the fact that the patent
application is not publicly available. Given this, it is the opinion
of the co-chairs that MARID should not undertake work on alternate
algorithms reasonably thought to be covered by the patent application.
On this I STRONGLY disagree. I believe there was in fact consensus that
we should work on alternative to PRA that is not covered by patent.
I also note that in light of that we do not know what exactly patent said,
nobody can not make a judgement call that any alternative would be covered
by patent. In fact if we do work on alternative and it turns out to be
covered by patent we'll know it because there would be another IPR
disclosure as this is in fact appropriate way to describe patent claims.
I'll publicly say that I'll ignore chairs recomendation that we do not
work on alternatives to PRA because I believe based on opinion expressed
by the large number of members of this WG that PRA would not reach consensus
of this WG to proceed to be a standard unless we provide an alternative that
does not have licensing limitations.
---
William Leibzon, Elan Networks:
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