John C Klensin wrote:
Hi.
I've recently had another close encounter with the patent system
and notions of prior art. It occurs to me that we could make a
slight modification to the Internet Draft structure and encourage
including an additional bit of information that would be quite
helpful in some cases:
...
So I think we
should encourage Internet-Draft editors and authors to list a
revision history when they consider it important.
..
And, where it seems appropriate to the authors or the community,
it seems to me that we might reasonably ask the RFC Editor to
carry these data forward into the archival form of the document
(if an RFC is actually produced).
John,
Those dates wouldn't be useful per se. Just because an RFC asserts "the
ideas herein originated at the following earlier date", that probably
isn't enough to establish the earlier date for patent purposes (pro or con).
A revision history might be useful for other reasons, esp. as the ID
progresses. But the ID is really the draft of an RFC (or a throw-away if
there isn't an RFC). Information on the preliminary versions of a
document, who added what when, etc. may be interesting at the time, but
the contents of an RFC should strive to transcend that level of content.
Joe