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Re: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

2008-08-15 09:40:49
At 7:31 AM -0700 8/15/08, Simon Josefsson wrote:
By submitting a draft to the IETF, you (normally) give the IETF rights
to build technology based on it. 

While I am sure that you don't mean to confuse this issue,
"to build technology based on it" has two possible meanings
here. "To build on this work in order to develop standards
in the area" is one, and someone submitting a draft
to the IETF normally does give the IETF those rights.

Other processes determine what rights are granted
to whom to build the (software|hardware) based on those standards.
One of those processes might be patent licensing or
acceptance  of a quid pro quo.  (such as accepting that the use
of a technology means you will not sue the holder of that
technology for patent infringement relevant to your own
rights--see Cisco's common  license).  Submitting a
draft does not give those rights to the IETF (and
the requirement that you file IPR claims  and licenses
relevant to it is a statement that filing the draft does
not grant those rights).

Again, I'm sure you know this in your bones, but since
this list is read by a variety of people who pick up conversations
at various places, I believe this needs to be said.
                regards,
                        Ted Hardie





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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