I'm conducting research for a new project, and am on a fishing expedition.
From time to time, I get notes from people who are lawyers or work for
lawyers asking questions in the form "when did you first do foo" where,
in my case, foo is usually something invented by one of my distinguished
colleagues which I happened to deploy.
What these people are doing (though they always too coy to admit it) is
trying to find prior art to defend against a patent infringement their
client received. These periodic queries led me to a theory that there
are a large number of patents which cover so-called inventions that were
probably documented at an earlier date in an internet-draft, an ietf
mailing list, an RFC, or perhaps even some form of report generated out
of an IETF, Interop, INET, IEPG, NANOG, RIPE, or Apricot meeting.
My fishing expedition is this:
Have other people received a lot of these "when did you first"
queries? If so, would you send me a private note? I promise not
to use your name without your permission and will summarize my
results for the list if there interest.
Regards,
Carl
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