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Re: IESG Considering a Revision to NOTE WELL

2012-11-07 07:09:49


--On Wednesday, 07 November, 2012 12:10 +0000 Brian E Carpenter
<brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:

...
My experience is that, when the disclosure is made by a
corporate IPR department on behalf of the actual contributor,
there can be at least a couple of months delay. If a draft is
at an early stage in the IETF process, that isn't usually
catastrophic, but it is a bit uncomfortable.

I wonder whether we should encourage an informal warning that
an IPR disclosure is in the pipeline, when such a corporate
delay is likely.

On the other hand, there is sometimes the happy outcome that
the corporate IPR people decide that the contribution does not
infringe the essential claims, so no disclosure is needed.

I think it would be hard to write rules here for reasons that
include the contrast above (and again note this is about the
rules, not about the NOTE WELL text).   But it would be
perfectly consistent with today's rules for a participant to
post a disclosure that says "I think there may be an issue here,
clarifying corporate statement will follow".  That wouldn't stop
the "timely" clock because it doesn't contain any substantive
information that could be evaluated.  I guess that, if I were
personally responsible for being sure that a timely disclosure
occurred and expected some months of delay, I'd consider such a
note to be a professional thing to do, especially since the BCPs
are (deliberately) vague and open-ended about exactly what a
disclosure has to contain.  

A WG seeing such a placeholder notice would presumably do
absolutely nothing other than remembering to ping the individual
and company if things got close to a critical decisions point
without any real information being available.

I can agree with "encourage", but I don't think any of this
requires extra text or rules.

best,
   john