On Friday, March 30, 2007 10:12:14 AM -0700 Paul Hoffman
<paul(_dot_)hoffman(_at_)vpnc(_dot_)org> wrote:
At 11:50 AM -0500 3/29/07, Mark Brown wrote:
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.
You may feel that this is an offer, but it is in fact a form of
bargaining. "If you put this on standards track, then we will (or might)
give a royalty-free license". That is a poor bargain for the IETF, and
the IETF should not consider the offer when it decides whether or not to
make the protocol a standard.
I think there is a significant exception which may apply in this case. If
the IPR issues are the sole remaining factor in the IETF's decision as to
whether to make a protocol a standard, then I think it is entirely
reasonable for the IETF to consider an offer which would eliminate or at
least mitigate those issues if the protocol were to become a standard. I
see nothing wrong with saying "I'm willing to grant a reasonable license if
my technology becomes a standard, but reserve the right to make money
otherwise", as long as the IETF does not allow such an offer to result in
adoption as a standard of something it would not have standardized
otherwise.
As for informational vs an independent submission, I think there is a
factor to be considered. It seems to me that an informational IETF
document is a fine way to say "this is a good idea, and we think this is
the right way to do FOO, but we can't actually recommend it (for whatever
reason)". For example, we have at least one document that defines the use
of elliptic curve cryptography with one of our protocols, which is
informational because the working group that produced it didn't feel they
could recommend it as a standard due to the hairy IPR issues surrounding
that technology.
-- Jeff
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