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Re: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

2008-08-15 09:32:58
By submitting a draft to the IETF, you (normally) give the IETF rights
to build technology based on it.  If an patent disclosure is related to
a draft someone submits, and the draft expires and the disclosure is
removed, someone else can pick up the draft and submit a new version.
Not being able to read the original patent disclosure in this situation
would be bad.

Further, there is nothing in the IETF policies that permit removing
patent disclosures today, so if you want to change the policy here I
believe you will need to get consensus to revise the IETF patent
policies.

/Simon

"Powers Chuck-RXCP20" <Chuck(_dot_)Powers(_at_)motorola(_dot_)com> writes:

I think that Stephan raised some very good points as to why allowing
some IPR disclosures to be removed actually makes sense. Since quite
often IPR disclosures are made for a specific ID in a specific working
group, if that WG ultimately does not choose that technology (and the ID
expires), I am curious as to what the value would be of keeping that IPR
disclosure on file forever? If narrowly worded (as many are), it would
not be applicable to any other ID submission or working group, and would
therefore have little use but to add to the growing list of disclosures
in the IETF IPR database.

I would be curious to hear the reasoning for keeping these on file,
apart from 'historical record', since I am not convinced the IETF IPR
database is the right place to hold onto IPR disclosures simply for
historical purposes that only apply to technology that will never see
the light of day in an IETF standard, since the IETF doesn't see any
value in keeping the IDs that they applied to in the first place.




Regards, 
Chuck 
------------- 
Chuck Powers, 
Motorola, Inc 
phone: 512-427-7261
mobile: 512-576-0008
 

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On 
Behalf Of Stephan Wenger
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 9:24 AM
To: IETF Discussion
Subject: Re: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

Hi all,

Nokia is one of the companies which submitted a number of 
withdrawal requests for previous disclosures.  In no case 
(that I'm aware of) our intention has been to sneak out of a 
licensing commitment.  Instead, we submitted withdrawal 
requests with the intention to keep the IETF patent database 
a useful tool---to do our share of database cleanup, so to speak.

For example, we removed disclosures where -the patent went 
away (e.g. an abandoned application with no intention to 
re-file the case) -the scope of protection changed in such a 
way that the previous disclosure became irrelevant, or -an 
I-D went away and, in our estimation, the protected 
technology has not been picked up in any other IETF document 
we are aware of.  (If it were, we would submit another 
disclosure for the same patent, but against a different 
draft.  This has happened once in case of Nokia).

We believe that these actions have been of advantage to the 
transparency of the IETF patent system, and transparency is 
important.  When writing "transparency", I mean transparency 
to the technical IETF contributor, who typically has neither 
interest, nor the qualification, to accurately interpret the 
legalese of patent disclosures.  (All too often guys just 
state "there's a patent on this draft", because they found 
something in the tracker---and in some WG, in practice, that 
can kill a draft.)

We also think that in an organization like the IETF, where 
language and practice suggests the disclosure of (unstable) 
patent applications against
(unstable) I-Ds, there is a need for a cleanup mechanism of 
some sort.  This is in contrast to organizations where one 
needs to declare only once at least one of the documents is 
reasonably stable.

I personally believe that the impact of a removal of a 
disclosure to a licensing promise is rather negligible.  The 
paper-trail of a disclosure can quite easily be reconstructed 
during litigation, if a need arises.  The IETF's patent 
database should focus on the practicalities required for IETF 
standardization only.

My suggestion would be to either continue the current 
practice, or implement something along the following lines:
  -an "invisible" flag, under control of the discloser
  -an "expert" mode in the database, which provides the whole 
paper-trail, and
  -a "standard" mode which lists only the most recent update 
of a disclosure (or the information that the request has been 
flagged "invisible" by the
submitter)

Regards,
Stephan


On 8/14/08 12:25 AM, "Simon Josefsson" <simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org> 
wrote:

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no> writes:

Simon Josefsson skrev:
Brian E Carpenter <brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> 
writes:

  

I wasn't even aware, during my tenure as chair, that the 
'remove' 
button existed. The only removals I recall, which may or 
may not be 
in the numbers Simon quoted, were completely bogus and 
nonsensical 
disclosures clearly filed by someone who was just 
fiddling around on the Web.
    

Some of the disclosures that are now removed were 
certainly not bogus.
For example, the patent license given in #833 was 
important input to 
a lengthy discussion relatively recently.
definitely agree on that one "for the record".

OTOH, to give a counterexample, I don't think there's any value to 
the community to having both #941 and #942 on file - 
they're duplicates.

Removing one out of two duplicates doesn't remove any 
patent-disclosure related information, so I don't think it 
is a good counter-example.

If removals should be permitted, the reasons for accepting 
a removal 
request should be well established.  I can think of at least two 
reasons that are valid:

* Exact duplicates
* Spam

Beyond this I'm less sure we can get away the liability concern.

False positives for spam could be a issue, so I'm not even sure the 
second one is OK.

/Simon
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