Ted Tso wrote: > The IETF has a rather higher > number of IPR disclosures in a year, and it's not at all clear the W3C > approach is sufficiently scalable.
The vast majority of IETF IPR disclosures are in the form of completely acceptable non-asserts that satisfy the needs of both proprietary and FOSS implementers. They pose no problems whatsoever. Only occasionally does someone submit a disclosure as misleading and confusing as the one relating to TLS. That is one that needs intelligent analysis. I can count on one hand the number of IETF RFCs that FSF and the FOSS community have objected to in recent years on patent grounds. (How many FSF campaigns do you remember?) That's certainly scalable. /Larry > -----Original Message----- > From: Theodore Tso [mailto:ty...@mit.edu] > Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 6:00 PM > To: Lawrence Rosen > Cc: ietf@ietf.org > Subject: Re: Consensus Call for draft-housley-tls-authz > > On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 04:08:23PM -0700, Lawrence Rosen wrote: > > > > What I've suggested is due diligence to determine the implications of > that > > disclosure. Only THEN is publication as an IETF RFC justified. > Experimental > > or not, industry standard or not, an IETF RFC encourages companies to > > implement and use the technology, and that may be patent infringement. > > > > Or it may be a bogus IPR disclosure that intelligent people could decide > to > > ignore. > > > > I am certainly not giving patent trolls any more power than they > deserve. In > > fact, I hope to dispose of this particular TLS patent troll once we get > a > > small group of patent attorneys to analyze the IPR disclosure like > > professionals do it. > > There is a huge amount of cost and risk in having companies > pariticipating in these sorts of "is this patent valid" discussions. > The liability exposure alone, not to mention concerns about the > potential trebling of damages, might be enough to stop many companies > from declining from participating. If no one volunteers to show up, > what should happen? Does the IETF not publish the standard? Such a > mandatory proposal might also be a sufficient denial-of-service attack > on the organization. > > What if some people show up, but they don't represent all sides of the > debate? Or several hundred crazied FSF'ers show up demanding to be > part of the process? You keep citing W3C, but what worked well for > them, which involved things like such patent discussions happening > completely secretly and restricted to W3C members only might not work > so well in the IETF context. In addition, while the W3C standards > might be important enough from a business perspective to justify > having companies send their highly paid patent attorneys to attend > formal meetings might not work so well for standards which are highly > important to the Internet, but which don't represent enough profit > potential to justify the heavyweight W3C approach. Finally, I'll note > that in the entire history of the W3C, they've only had 3 such > private/secret patent examination teams. The IETF has a rather higher > number of IPR disclosures in a year, and it's not at all clear the W3C > approach is sufficiently scalable. > > - Ted _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
