Simon,
You observed:
Normal IPR disclosure process is to alert the IETF community via
the IETF
website that a patent has been filed. I mistakenly thought that
adding the
boilerplate IPR statement at the top of the ID was sufficient to
say what
needed to be said. However, I don't think IETF requires the
disclosure of
an unpublished patent application.
I believe that is required even for patent applications. RFC 3979
talks about patent applications in several places.
You're right, please let me correct myself again here. My use of the term
"disclosure" was sloppy. Here's what I was told by IESG:
The IESG has been informed by Mark Brown that he had knowledge of the
September 2005 patent application filed by his employer at the time
he submitted draft-housley-tls-authz-extns. Accordingly, he was
obligated to disclose the existence of this patent application upon
making this submission. Making a required IPR disclosure after a
draft is approved does not meet the requirement to promptly make the
disclosure. According to section 7 of RFC 3979 failure to make a
required disclosure is a failure of process. It should be noted that
the above disclosure obligations apply to unpublished patent
applications. When a patent application that is required to be
disclosed is unpublished, the discloser must 'indicate that the claim
is based on unpublished patent applications', but is not required to
list the application number (see RFC 3978 Section 6.4.1).
The content of the IETF-required IPR disclosure is this:
1. (YES) "the discloser must 'indicate that the claim is based on
unpublished patent applications'"
Not these:
2. (NO) "list the application number (see RFC 3978 Section 6.4.1)."
3. (NO) otherwise publish to the IETF the pending patent claims or
description of the invention disclosed in any unpublished patent
application(s)
What I meant to say in my earlier email is that I don't think IETF requires
disclosure of the body of the patent application, it's claims, etc. as in
(3). I recognize that IETF does require the required IPR disclosure made via
http://www.ietf.org/ipr-instructions as described in (1).
This probably isn't news to any of you, but I wanted to correct my sloppy
use of the term "disclosure".
Thanks,
mark
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