Thanks to those who have been working on this. I have some mostly minor
comments below. Some of the comments below relate to text that hasn't changed
from RFC 3979. But it seems that the changes being suggested in the document
are substantial anyway, so I've included comments on both old and new text.
= General =
1) I agree with other commenters' concerns about the definition of
"participating" with respect to WG chairs and ADs. In particular in the context
of section 6, this seems like it could limit the pool of people who can stand
for AD roles, because you're not allowed to participate in cases where you
won't be able to disclose, but you have no idea a priori what WGs will get
chartered in your area and what work items they might take up.
2) I find it quite awkward that the document sometimes uses "IPR" as a singular
noun yet expands the acronym to be intellectual property rights (plural). E.g.,
there are multiple instances of the phrase "IPR is." Would suggest an edit pass
to clean that up.
= Sec 3.3 =
The title of this section indicates that it is about Participants. Then the two
bullets refer to "The Contributor." This is confusing. Maybe the title should
be Obligations on Participants and Contributors and the text should refer to
Contributors (plural) or "Each Contributor" to match "each Participant."
= Sec 5.1 =
I would suggest merging the text in 5.2.1 into 5.1.1 and merging the text in
5.2.2 into 5.1.2.
= Sec 5.1.3 =
If any person has information about IPR that may Cover a written
Contribution, but such person is not required to disclose such IPR
because it does not meet the criteria in Section 6.6 (e.g., the IPR
is not owned or controlled by the person or his or her employer or
sponsor, or such person is not an IETF Participant),
There is no Section 6.6.
= Sec 5.2.2 =
"Participants who realize that IPR meeting the conditions of Section
5.6 will be or has been incorporated into a Contribution, or is
seriously being discussed in a working group, are strongly encouraged
to make a preliminary IPR disclosure."
What does it mean for IPR to be incorporated into a Contribution? I feel like
since the document defines "Covers," this requirement should use the defined
word.
Similarly, this text seems to imply that IPR would be "in" a Contribution
rather than Covered by it:
"If an IETF Participant first learns of IPR that meets the conditions
of Section 5.6 in a Contribution by another party, for example a new
patent application or the discovery of a relevant patent in a patent
portfolio, after the Contribution was made …"
Alissa
On Mar 22, 2016, at 5:17 AM, Jari Arkko
<jari(_dot_)arkko(_at_)piuha(_dot_)net> wrote:
All,
RFC 3979 was published in 2005. Since then we’ve gathered a lot of
experience, and we’d like to update the RFC with that experience. This isn’t
a revolution of the IETF IPR approach, it is mostly about clarification,
better documentation, and recognising some other new RFCs and changes. But
the document itself has changed quite a lot and structured differently than
RFC 3979 was.
Some of the main issues (such as how to define participation) were discussed
in the IETF-87 meeting, but there are also a number of other changes in this
document. Please give this document a careful read, and let us know your
feedback.
I am starting a last call on this document today, but gave a longer last call
period to make sure everyone has enough time to comment after IETF-95 as
well. And thanks for the comments that some of you have already sent after
the document was published; we’ve observed them and will make them part of
the feedback from the Last Call.
The document is available here:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-bradner-rfc3979bis/
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-bradner-rfc3979bis-08
Jari Arkko (as the responsible AD for this document)