I'm conducting research for a new project, and am on a fishing expedition. >From time to time, I get notes from people who are lawyers or work for lawyers asking questions in the form "when did you first do foo" where, in my case, foo is usually something invented by one of my distinguished colleagues which I happened to deploy. What these people are doing (though they always too coy to admit it) is trying to find prior art to defend against a patent infringement their client received. These periodic queries led me to a theory that there are a large number of patents which cover so-called inventions that were probably documented at an earlier date in an internet-draft, an ietf mailing list, an RFC, or perhaps even some form of report generated out of an IETF, Interop, INET, IEPG, NANOG, RIPE, or Apricot meeting. My fishing expedition is this: Have other people received a lot of these "when did you first" queries? If so, would you send me a private note? I promise not to use your name without your permission and will summarize my results for the list if there interest. Regards, Carl _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf