Hi,
I would suggest to handle this issue calmly from here on.
In this specific case, even assuming validity of the patent, the rightholder
may already have a enforceability problem based on what I also perceive as a
clear IETF process violation. As the very minimum, if the patent were ever
asserted, the process violation gives the alleged infringer's lawyers
something to work with.
If the IESG were inclined, as a body, to document its perception of a
process violation, then things would look even brighter to me.
Rescinding the RFC-to-be in question may be an option, unless the technology
is really a big step forward. If it were, though, I would probably vote (if
I had a vote, which I do not) to issue the RFC anyway. It's clearly within
our policy to issue the RFC, if we choose to do so, even in the presence of
a process violation like this.
Rescinding RFCs-to-be only based on late disclosures may set a precedence
for the future we may not like.
The mechanisms to challenge the validity of a patent depend on the
legislation. In the US, one example is a request for re-examination. A
good foundation for such a request would be the presence of Prior Art not
considered during the prosecution phase. The effort and cost involved is
significant and can be compared to the prosecution of a patent. One problem
with re-examination is that one has to show that the patent office was wrong
in issuing the patent originally. That is, one does not only fight the
interests of the rightholder, but also the established opinion of the patent
office. No one likes to be proven wrong, and, therefore, re-examination is
often an uphill battle against an established bureaucracy.
For patent families with significant international coverage, multiply effort
and risk by the number of legislations involved.
Regards,
Stephan
On 11/19/09 3:40 AM, "Scott Lawrence"
<scott(_dot_)lawrence(_at_)nortel(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 19:02 -0700, Cullen Jennings wrote:
On October 8, the IESG approved the registration of application/3gpp-
ims+xml Media Type. On Nov 2, RIM filed an IPR disclosure related to
this at
https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1219/
The associated patent, filed Oct 2008, is at
http://www.google.com/patents?id=Mk7GAAAAEBAJ
and the related draft is
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bakker-sipping-3gpp-ims-xml-body-handling
Quite aside from the question of what the IESG should do about the
registration, my reading of this patent finds nothing novel. Almost all
the claims (including the first one, upon which all others are based),
are essentially just claiming invention of multi-part mime, which
predated the application by several years.
Is there (should there be) a mechanism whereby the IETF or one of our
more corporate parents can file some challenge to the patent having been
issued?
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