RE: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

I don't believe there is anything in the IETF policies that forbids the
removal of an IPR declaration, either, so no IPR Policy change would in
fact be required. IMO, that argument is a non-starter.

As for someone else 'picking up' an ID that someone else submitted, the
only situation I could see that even being relevant too would be having
the original sumbitter lose interest, but someone else in the same
working group picking up the draft and running with it. Perhaps, this
might be a good reason to maintain the IPR disclosures until the working
group is closed down, or some other clear sign that the contribution
made into that working group will never go anywhere. As from someone
taking an ID contributed into a working group and trying to push it into
something else, again, a good attorney will ensure that the IPR
disclosure would not be valid for that case. Maybe that is the filter -
for IPR disclosures specific to a working group, if the technology
didn't make it into the standard that working group was drafting, and
the work on that standard is complete, then removal would be
appropriate.


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

-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Josefsson [mailto:simon(_at_)josefsson(_dot_)org] 
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 9:32 AM
To: Powers Chuck-RXCP20
Cc: Stephan Wenger; IETF Discussion
Subject: Re: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

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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