RE: Patents can be for good, not only evil

How many Working Group participants who vent on patent issues have read RFC 
3669?
 
Of those who have read it, how many consider it to be binding?
 
All RFC 3669 does is to allow endless discussion of topics that most WGs do not 
consider core. They may be important considerations but the Working Groups 
themselves are the wrong place to do design work in the IPR space.
 
Very few Working Group participants have any real interest or understanding of 
the patent system other than to wish it would go away. The most likely reason a 
WG participant would have detailed knowedge is if they were an unwilling 
participant in a patent lawsuit or had a proposal shot down because some group 
of lawyers objected to the IPR terms (both have happend to me). 
 
The bulk of the opinions expressed might be characterized as ideological rather 
than informed. So what we get as a result is not a useful discussion, its more 
like a slashdot flamewa
 
Its not productive discussion, the arguments are entirely repetative.
 
Eliminating repetative, unproductive arguments is the function of the charter. 
We write charters that rule technical issues such as designing a new PKI, Web 
Services transport layer, cryptographic algorithm, &ct &ct out of scope. So why 
not rule the IPR question out of scope at the charter stage unlss there is a 
specific reason to beleive that a WG would need to deal with it?
 
A charter statement is never the final word, WGs discover that their charter 
needs changing all the time. If a group discovers that there are unforseen IPR 
issues it cannot resolve it has the choice of disbanding without a 
recommendation, rechartering or making non standards track submissions.
 
Understanding the IPR landscape is one of the things I always try to do before 
starting or joining a group. IPR is always a BOF topic. It is not that we don't 
discuss in advance. In fact in many cases the whole raison d'etre for the group 
is to create an unencumbered standard to replace a proprietary protocol.
 
For example, take a look at the Ford-Wienner key management patent which is due 
to expire at some point in the not so distant future. The invention describes a 
lightweight CRM scheme. I can well imagine that someone might want to start a 
working group to produce an unencumbered CRM protocol based on Ford-Wienner and 
S/MIME. The whole point of chartering a group of that type would be to produce 
a RANDZ protocol and so it should be stated in the charter.
 
 
I don't think that there are many cases where a non RANDZ IPR clause is going 
to fly. About the only one I can think of offhand would be that we are comming 
to a situation where ECC crypto is becomming seen as necessary for certain 
applications. There are credible IPR claims to at least some methods of 
performing ECC crypto. There are certainly parties that see a need to deploy 
ECC before the IPR encumberances expire.
 
The main objection to specifying IPR in a WG charter appears to be that it 
would prevent groups like S/MIME from considering ECC algorithms. While this 
would be true if S/MIME were rechartered with a restriction of that type I also 
think that its the wrong forum for the discussion. One WG chartered with 
applying ECC to all active IETF protocols would be a much more efficient 
approach and much more likely to provide a consistent result.
 
 
I can even imagine that a WG of that type might have a time horizon. Allowing 
technologies to be considered if they will be available on RANDZ terms after a 
specific date. That would create an incentive for the Patent Rights Holder to 
remove ambiguity as to which patents are covered and when they expire. This 
might possibly provide an incentive for the Patent Rights Holder to renounce 
rights to certain claims after the time horizon expires in order to get their 
technology adopted.
 
If we have two technologies on offer, A and B from different parties I want to 
be able to set up a bidding war between the parties to offer the most favorable 
terms.
 
The current IETF practice looks more like the prisoners dilema, the rules of 
the game cause the parties to chose the worst outcome. Axelrod's point was you 
can change the rules of the game.
 
 
________________________________

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no]
Sent: Tue 30/10/2007 1:29 AM
To: lrosen(_at_)rosenlaw(_dot_)com; ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: Patents can be for good, not only evil





--On 29. oktober 2007 17:53 -0700 Lawrence Rosen 
<lrosen(_at_)rosenlaw(_dot_)com>
wrote:

> The notion that each IETF working group has to approach patent issues on
> its own, without help, is silly.
It's also a straw man.

RFC 3669. You may argue that we can do better, but the argument that there
is "no help" is silly.




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