On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:12:18 +0200 Simon Josefsson <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The community needs to evaluate patent claims, and preferably reach > conservative agreement (rough consensus is not good enough) on whether > we should care about a particular patent or not. Input to that > community evaluation process may be documentation of legal actions > taken by a patent owner. Sometimes that may happen only after a > document has been published. > > I would support down-grading standards track documents that later turn > out to be patent-infected to informational. Doing so would avoid > sending a message that the IETF supports patented technology, when the > IETF community didn't know about the patents at publication time. For > credibility of the process, I believe it is important that these > decisions are only made based on publicly available information. > To be consistent with IETF process and IPR policy, I think that the only way to do that is via a "standards action" -- an IETF consensus call (often preceeded by a WG discussion and last call) to downgrade the document. Reclassifying documents as Historic is done by separate RFCs -- I suspect that that's the mechanism that would have to be followed here. Look at it this way -- we give WGs the right to standardize encumbered technologies. If we're to later reject technologies because they've become encumbered, it's really a case of going through the same sort of decision process. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf