At 10:48 AM -0800 2/13/09, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
>That's why I'm so irritated that the previous IPR WG, since disbanded
>(fortunately), refused even to discuss a patent policy for IETF.
Armed with my calming cup of white tea, I point out that this is not
true. The group considered the question of whether an update in
this area was required, and it declined to take on any change.
The current policy is that IETF participants are required to notify
the IETF of any IPR which they reasonably and personally know
to cover a contribution. This allows individual participants to make
informed decisions about whether they wish to support work
on those contributions and the WGs and IETF as a whole whether it
wishes to publish the work, given the known situation.
Taking that set of decisions out of the WGs and into a specialist
body has substantial risks, chief among them the risk that the body's
analysis of the risk does not come with insurance cover for the
decisions taken by individuals. If the body says "This patent
application is invalidated by prior art" and the patent examiners
do not agree, those who have acted on that basis are in a troublesome
situation. If the specialist body says "This patent does not cover this draft"
and a court later disagrees, the same is true. Also, if the body says "this
patent does cover this draft", it is the WG participants who spend
time and effort to develop an alternative, possibly only to later discover
that they would have disagreed with the specialist body on either
the coverage or the risks inherent in infringement.
The IPR working group also pointed out, repeatedly, the risk in demanding
that all submissions to the IETF have no known encumbrance: anyone
can claim they have covering IPR at any time and use that tool to block progress
on a standard. Given the value of maintaining a proprietary lock on some
areas, this is a substantial risk.
The IETF policy amounts to this: you must disclose what you know, and the
people impacted by the decision make it. I'm sorry that irritates you, Larry,
but I remain convinced that it is the right thing for the IETF.
Two cents and one bag of "Moonlight Spice", steeped 5 minutes, worth
of opinion,
Ted Hardie
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