On 11-May-24 18:41, Carsten Bormann wrote:
On 11. May 2024, at 07:11, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't see how we can be more precise, since every case is a bit different.
There is another kind of the kinds of legal constructs that are commonly spun as “IPR”, namely, patent claims.
Here, we give the WG a lot of power to decide whether it is really necessary to have a standard that might be encumbered by such.
This is very much because each case is different there as well.
(Making the process of handling patent claims explicit in the WG process also often motivates putative rights holders to make statements that enable the use of potentially encumbered technology in an open standard.)
Grüße, Carsten
PS.: In order to discuss this based on concrete examples:
One mild example of reference here would be IEEE 1588, which requires access through a paywall [normatively referenced for example in RFC 8173, draft-ietf-cbor-time-tag].
Another, even milder one would be C or C++, which are behind a paywall, but technically identical versions are freely available [normatively referenced for example in RFC 8949, draft-ietf-cbor-edn-literals].
Obviously, much worse cases of encumbrance on the specification access side are conceivable.
E.g., I haven’t analyzed what referencing CSA specifications (“Matter”) would imply, and I’m not sure we ever did this work for the specs of the BlueTooth SIG.
I wondered about BlueTooth as an example of a problem case, but the citation in RFC 7668 is freely available, as are all BT specs: https://www.bluetooth.com/specifications/specs/
I think our experience of saying to other SDOs "If you want the Internet to use your spec, we need to cite it in RFCs and it needs to be freely available" has been fairly successful. I read this draft as guidance for the cases where this fails.
If this draft doesn't become a BCP, I expect that the IESG will do what it says anyway, since we sometimes have no choice but to cite paywalled standards. The IEEE is very much an example of this. I now have a copy of IEEE 1588 which says, inter alia,
"Warning! Make sure that you obtained this publication from an authorized distributor.
Authorized licensed use limited to: University of Auckland. Downloaded on May 11,2024 at 20:24:50 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply."
so I'd better be careful not to read it without putting my academic hat on.
Brian
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