Ted Tso wrote:
The IETF has a rather higher
number of IPR disclosures in a year, and it's not at all clear the W3C
approach is sufficiently scalable.
The vast majority of IETF IPR disclosures are in the form of completely
acceptable non-asserts that satisfy the needs of both proprietary and FOSS
implementers. They pose no problems whatsoever.
Only occasionally does someone submit a disclosure as misleading and
confusing as the one relating to TLS. That is one that needs intelligent
analysis.
I can count on one hand the number of IETF RFCs that FSF and the FOSS
community have objected to in recent years on patent grounds. (How many FSF
campaigns do you remember?) That's certainly scalable.
/Larry
-----Original Message-----
From: Theodore Tso [mailto:tytso(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu]
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 6:00 PM
To: Lawrence Rosen
Cc: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Consensus Call for draft-housley-tls-authz
On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 04:08:23PM -0700, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
What I've suggested is due diligence to determine the implications of
that
disclosure. Only THEN is publication as an IETF RFC justified.
Experimental
or not, industry standard or not, an IETF RFC encourages companies to
implement and use the technology, and that may be patent infringement.
Or it may be a bogus IPR disclosure that intelligent people could decide
to
ignore.
I am certainly not giving patent trolls any more power than they
deserve. In
fact, I hope to dispose of this particular TLS patent troll once we get
a
small group of patent attorneys to analyze the IPR disclosure like
professionals do it.
There is a huge amount of cost and risk in having companies
pariticipating in these sorts of "is this patent valid" discussions.
The liability exposure alone, not to mention concerns about the
potential trebling of damages, might be enough to stop many companies
from declining from participating. If no one volunteers to show up,
what should happen? Does the IETF not publish the standard? Such a
mandatory proposal might also be a sufficient denial-of-service attack
on the organization.
What if some people show up, but they don't represent all sides of the
debate? Or several hundred crazied FSF'ers show up demanding to be
part of the process? You keep citing W3C, but what worked well for
them, which involved things like such patent discussions happening
completely secretly and restricted to W3C members only might not work
so well in the IETF context. In addition, while the W3C standards
might be important enough from a business perspective to justify
having companies send their highly paid patent attorneys to attend
formal meetings might not work so well for standards which are highly
important to the Internet, but which don't represent enough profit
potential to justify the heavyweight W3C approach. Finally, I'll note
that in the entire history of the W3C, they've only had 3 such
private/secret patent examination teams. The IETF has a rather higher
number of IPR disclosures in a year, and it's not at all clear the W3C
approach is sufficiently scalable.
- Ted
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