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Re: Gen-ART LC Review of draft-eggert-successful-bar-bof-06

2011-09-09 10:06:27

On Sep 9, 2011, at 3:02 AM, Lars Eggert wrote:

Hi,

thanks, Ben. We will incorporate most of your suggestions in the next 
revision. That said:

On 2011-9-8, at 0:22, Ben Campbell wrote:
-- Section 6 suggests side meetings should be (somehow "informally") covered 
by NOTE WELL. I think this is a very dangerous suggestion. The rest of the 
document suggests that a side meeting has no official standing. That seems 
to me to mean it's no different than a group of people who coincidentally 
participate in the IETF having a dinner or bar meeting on any subject at any 
time. Or a hallway conversation, for that matter. By the logic of this 
section, I can't really figure out how "informal" a meeting would need to be 
before it no longer fell under NOTE WELL.

In an informal meeting, the participants should be able to follow any IPR 
policy they like. I can even imagine an informal meeting covered by an NDA, 
where the participants want to decide if they want to have further 
discussions of a subject under IETSF IPR rules or not.

I think the best we can hope to do is suggest that side meeting organizers 
and participants be explicit with their expectations on IPR and 
confidentiality, so there is less chance for down-stream surprises. If we 
want something stronger than that, then we really need to create a new 
category of "official" meeting.

We actually ran this question past the IETF legal counsel before adding that 
section to the document. It was his stated opinion that the Note Well 
applies. I therefore don't see what we could do here.


Did the counsel describe the triggers that causes Note Well to apply in 
general? Because if it automatically applies to an unofficial side meeting, 
then it's hard for me to see where it _doesn't_ apply when 2 or more IETF 
participants have a conversation. For example:


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