On Sep 16, 2013, at 1:37 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com>
wrote:
(2) Whether the "submitted in full conformance..." statement in
I-Ds is sufficient to cover IPR up to the point of posting of
the I-D. If the answer is "no", then there is a question of why
we are wasting the bits. If it is "yes", as I assume it is,
then any pre-sausage questions can and should be limited to IPR
that might be new to one or more of the authors.
This is a claim in the boilerplate which the IETF, not the authors, are making.
So asking the question is entirely appropriate; the authors' answers need to
be known to the IESG prior to publication, and the fact that the boilerplate
says what it says does not mean that the authors' answers are known. This
isn't an insult to the authors—it's simply a practicality: evidence suggests
that not all authors at all times are aware of what the boilerplate actually
means, and this isn't surprising since it's added by the tool, not typed in
each time by each author.
So whether this counts as a requirement or not I don't know, but on a practical
level, asking the question saves time and reduces ambiguity; it's hard to see
that as a negative, and it's astonishing that a long-time IETF participant
could conceive it to be a deliberate offense.