Hi Rainer, These documents are the current state of thought in the IETF on IPR, trademarks, etc.
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipr-wg-guidelines-05.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipr-submission-rights-08.txt http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ipr-technology-rights-12.txt I don't think that we're violating any trademarks by assigning a common name to a defined field in a protocol. However, I'll send a note around (off list) to make sure. I'll provide a summary back to the list. Thanks, Chris On Wed, 28 Jan 2004, Rainer Gerhards wrote: > Hi WG, > > I thought that "structured data element" is a bit lengthy and was tempted to replace > it by the abbreviation "SDE" in the protcol-02 darft. However, I found that this is > a trademark. Than, I did some trademark searchon TAG, and voilá, it too is > trademarked. I didn't bother to dig for the other abbreviations, but I think some of > them will be the same as existing trademarks. > > I would appreciate advise from someone with experience on this issue. Is it really > an issue? Can I use "SDE" or need I to stick with the longer form? > > Any help is deeply appreciated, > Rainer > > > >