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RE: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

2008-08-16 04:33:08
Understood.
/jim

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org 
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On
Behalf Of Noel Chiappa
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 10:34 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Cc: jnc(_at_)mercury(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu
Subject: RE: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

    > From: "Bound, Jim" <Jim(_dot_)Bound(_at_)hp(_dot_)com>

    > I believe the IETF should not permit at some date in
the future any
    > part of a specification to have any IPR from any vendor that is
    > accountable to patents or royalties. In simpler terms
anything we
    > develop in the IETF is public domain in the legal
context, and we do
    > not use any vendor patents for any of our work.

This is impossible without a great deal of additional work,
and an additional lengthy (multi-year delay), for reasons
that I would have thought would have been obvious.

The thing is that anyone can have a patent which bears on an
IETF spec, and the holder of that patent might not even be
active in the IETF. So the IETF could issue a spec, everyone
could implement it, and once they've been selling gear for
some months, people could get demand letters from someone
we've never heard of.

There is no easy way to detect such 'submarine' patents - and
doing a lengthy search of all issued patents is not
guaranteed to find such things either, as the patent in
question may have been applied for, but not yet issued
(various jurisdictions have differing rules on whether
applications are made public).

About the only thing that's relatively sure to ensure there
are no patent issues is for the IETF to patent the spec, and
see if the patent office allows the patent. If so, then
you're _probably_ (but not necessarily, as the patent office
does make mistakes fairly often) OK. Of course, that will add
many years to our approval process.

    > the base core IETF specs are patent, royalty, and IPR
free to all
    > worldwide regardless of geography or governmental boundaries.

Now you've just multiplied the work by a factor of over 100,
as each patent jurisdiction worldwide has its own set of patents.


    > From: John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>

    > I believe that the right way to handle these cases
involves _not_
    > having IPR submissions go directly to the database but
instead be the
    > subject of a nominal manual review  ...
    > Being a little proactive in that way prevents nonsense
from getting
    > into the database in the first place and saves us
discussions about the
    > appropriate boundaries for removing something already posted.

Excellent point.

        Noel
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