Hi.
I've recently had another close encounter with the patent system
and notions of prior art. It occurs to me that we could make a
slight modification to the Internet Draft structure and encourage
including an additional bit of information that would be quite
helpful in some cases:
Lets say we have draft-ietf-foo-bar-09.txt. It bears a date, but
usually gives no clue about when the basic ideas were first
exposed to the Internet community. For determining when an idea
became part of the common knowledge and practice of experts in
the field, that information is all-important. So I think we
should encourage Internet-Draft editors and authors to list a
revision history when they consider it important.
This could be as simple as a note similar to that used by many
journals, i.e., a line that says "first version posted
2000.04.01" or "first submitted 1999.12.25". Or the author
could choose to list each version number, the date, and perhaps a
brief summary of major ideas introduced.
And, where it seems appropriate to the authors or the community,
it seems to me that we might reasonably ask the RFC Editor to
carry these data forward into the archival form of the document
(if an RFC is actually produced).
Note that I am _not_ recommending a rule or requirement. Only
that we examine the advantages of having history and tracking
information available in cases where I-Ds are documenting
protocol ideas that could be subject to IPR claims and that, when
having it seems useful to someone, that we encourage documenting
and keeping it in very public ways.
john