Russ Housley wrote:
BCP 79 says:
"Reasonably and personally known": means something an individual
knows personally or, because of the job the individual holds,
would reasonably be expected to know. This wording is used to
indicate that an organization cannot purposely keep an individual
in the dark about patents or patent applications just to avoid the
disclosure requirement. But this requirement should not be
interpreted as requiring the IETF Contributor or participant (or
his or her represented organization, if any) to perform a patent
search to find applicable IPR.
Your suggestion seems to be in direct conflict with BCP 79.
IMHO your quote from BCP79 (page 4, bullet l.) is a very important
point in BCP79. I can not speak for others, but the Internet Proxy
of our company blocks urls to all "well known" online patent search
and patent publication sites (and these are the only blocked sites
I've ever encountered) for the simple reason of the insane US patent
laws with this 3-fold "punitive damages" for "willful infringement"
of a patent, i.e. a patent that was known to exist when shipping.
As engineers, we MUST NOT read any patents because of this.
All of the patent reasarch stuff is done by patent lawyers exclusively.
I don't know if a similar block exists, but the policy is the same for us.
Such a policy, if implemented, could easily lead to various people being
unable to participate in the process.
btw. I personally know only about one patent where I refused to be
listed as inventor because I considered my contribution to it to be
"obvious to someone skilled in the technology". When I read the
description after it had been processed by patent lawyers, I had
serious difficulties understanding what that text meant...
A pretty common occurance, unfortunately.
Ned