On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:54:53PM +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > > >Well, if IPR owners don't actually care, why are they asking people to > >send a postcard? It would seem to be an unnecessary administrative > >burden for the IPR owners, yes? > > My assumption is that they care if the party that fails to send > a postcard is one of their competitors. That's what the defensive > clauses in these licenses are all about, afaics. So if there is a license which is not sublicensable, where if a competitor wanted to field a product that required the patent license --- I would rather doubt it if the competitor would want to ship software or hardware where each individual end user had to send a signed, notarized paper form to the IPR holder, and wait for a paper response, before they would be allowed to use that product. So that brings up an interesting question. Suppose an IPR holder approached the IETF, with a claim that they were offerring an "royalty free" license, but one which was not sublicensable and which contained extremely onerous terms that applied to the individual end user. (``After receiving an individually framed patent license, the end user must jump up and down 17 times on one foot while chanting, "Hail Billy, the Gates is with you, I promise to never use Open Document."'' :-) Now suppose the IPR disclosure filed with the IETF didn't say anything at all about any reasonable and nondiscriminatory licenses alternative to said royalty free license. At this point, we could end up with a situation where a company tries to implement an IETF standard, realizes that the reliance on the "royalty free" license is untenable, goes back to the IPR holder, only discover that the only other alternatives are under terms which are anything but RAND. So at the minimum, if we're not going to establish requirements on royalty-free licenses being at least (a) perpetual, and (b) automatically sub-licensable, (maybe those could be defined as part of "reasonable" as it applies to RF licenses?) it would probably be a good idea to require a statement by the IPR holders to state their position on a RAND licensing as well. Otherwise, we could end up in a situation where we discover after the fact that the only way to implement the standard is via a completely unreasonable set of "royalty-free" terms that make it completely useless for either an OSS or commercial/propietary product, and with no statement about RAND licensing terms. Basically, there seems to be a loophole in our current wording which could allow a bad actor who was determined to use patents as a strategic weapon a way to lay trap which could seriously compromise the deployment of an IETF standard. - Ted P.S. For the record, my personal list of reasonable RF license terms include: 1) Perpetual (MUST) 2) Sub-licensable (MUST) 3) Restriction to essential claims necessary to implement a standard (MAY) 4) Defensive clauses which revoke a patent license in the event of patent litigation (MAY) (Some OSS advocates will disagree with me on #3, and there I will agree with Brian that if an OSS requires a universal patent license, it's probably a bug in the OSS license --- and the ones who try to use the OSD language about fields of endeavor are trying to apply standards designed for copyright licenses, and they may not be appropriate for patent licenses. But there will be plenty of room to debate this particular issue --- but probably better to do it in the IPR working group. :-) --- Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and not necessarily the opinions of my employer; I'm not important enough to affect the pinions of my employer. :-) _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf