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Re: Removal of IETF patent disclosures?

2008-08-19 07:03:30
"Powers Chuck-RXCP20" <Chuck(_dot_)Powers(_at_)motorola(_dot_)com> writes:

I don't feel that strongly about being able to remove patent disclosures
which no longer have any value; if the concensus is to keep them in an
increasingly cluttered list of disclosures, so be it. The only situation
I was looking to avoid was the whining that would ensue when a patent
holder submitted a disclosure for a specific contribution into a
specific working group, the technology doesn't make it into the
standard, and then someone else later tries to take that same
technology, knowing (or not) that a disclosure was on file for it for
the original submission, puts it into an ID for another working group,
and then finds out the hard way that the original licensing commitment
doesn't apply. However, I guess knowing that there might be some
proprietary technology in the original contribution (and thus the latter
one) would still be useful information, even if the licensing commitment
was no longer valid.

Indeed.  If the original patent disclosure has been removed, there would
be no way to know that the contribution was covered by patent claims and
then the document would be fair game for re-publication by someone else.

I believe there would be significantly more whining if the IETF had
removed the patent license in the situation you describe.

So I think your argument is actually one in favor of disallowing
removals.

I expect the result will be more specifics in each patent disclosure,
and the subsequent submission of amendments by patent holders
reiterating that a licensing commitment is no longer valid, with the
failure of the specific contribution to make it into the IETF standard
that was originally targeted.

That seems fairly common already.

What can happen is also that companies decide that restricting the
patent license to published standards doesn't give them any advantage,
and they decide to use more liberal patent licenses.

/Simon
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