> From: sob@xxxxxxxxxxx (scott bradner) > see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Prior_art > > prior art is still useful but not necessarily in naive, open compilations that do patent holders the most good. I was told by participants in the XOR-cursor court battle that it was lost because the opposition learned of the killer prior art in time to weave a defense. Recall the results of the re-examination of the LZW patent. Prior art is not nearly as effective as it is supposed to be according to people who've never spent time and money with patent lawyers. The notion that the IETF can do anything about bogus patents is at best the obverse of the bad coin that let Motorola-Codex mess up CCP and try to attack Van Jacobson Compression in the PPPEXT WG for years starting about 10 years ago. The IETF administration professed to take those patents seriously. A list of relevant patents without pretensions of prior art lets people use their own judgement. If you are competent to implement a protocol, then you probably have a fair idea of the readily available prior art. The important data are the names of the patent holders. When you look at patents, you should not be trying to decide whether your lawyers can use prior art to break them in court, even in the unlikely case that you are competent to have legal opinions. You should be deciding whether the patent holders would want to block the sale or use of your implementation. If the patents are only defensive or if you are writing open source, then you might choose to go ahead no matter what you think of the validity of the patents. If by virtue of their owners, the patents seem likely to be used for extortion or to enforce a monopoly, then the bogosity of the patents and prior art are also irrelevant, since a successful court battle would cost years and zillions of dollars. You also have noticed that court attacks on patents are rarely successful. At worst the notion that the IETF can do more than say "these IPR claims are known" is a mechanism for people who claim to be spokesmen for large communities to inflate themselves. If the Open Source Community were much more real than Jeff William's "INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!)" and able to work with the IETF to fix the patent mess, then it could fix the patent mess without help from the debating society that is the IETF. The power and the glory of the IETF is that it is literally just a debating society. In that supposedly monolitic Open Source Community, users, particularly redistributors and packagers, have far more compelling reasons than authors of open source to care about patents. The calls for the IETF and open source authors to get involved in patent fights can be seen as efforts by politicians and redistributors of our work to shift even more of the burden of making their profits and reputations to us. Vernon Schryver vjs@xxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf