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Re: IESG Considering a Revision to NOTE WELL

2012-11-06 09:55:04

On Nov 6, 2012, at 10:42 AM, Paul Wouters wrote:

On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:

This note is rather lighter in weight and tone than its predecessor, and 
seems like a good direction.

Can you explain your reasoning why this seems like "a good direction".

Not being a lawyer, I can't comment on the legal details of IPR cases. What I 
am looking at is the understandability of a statement. A lawyer that I was 
speaking with recently told me that the IETF IPR policy is ambiguous; one must 
file IPR statements for standards, but not for informational documents. We 
wound up wandering through the details of legal statements, in which I felt he 
was working pretty hard to make words stand on their heads.

To my small and non-legal mind, the simplest statement is the clearest, and 
what the average IETFer needs is clarity. The policy is, as far as I know, that 
if I have or personally and reasonably know that my company has IPR on a 
document or statement of any category, I need to say so and encourage my 
company to say so; if someone else does, I am encouraged to make the fact 
known. Making that statement in any more complex way gives the appearance of 
complexity of thought, and this particular lawyer was finding 
complexity/ambiguity where no complexity/ambiguity exists. 

KISS.

For example, how would the new Note Well improve our situation in
the Versign DNSSEC case?

Link to patent: 
http://domainnamewire.com/2012/10/05/verisign-files-patent-application-for-way-of-transfering-hosting-on-dnssec-domains/

Comparison of Patent vs IETF work: http://ubuntuone.com/4Bz1BqOsGMkTUQgViEL0rz

Paul

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The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially. 
   - Marshall McLuhan