On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:54:53PM +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote: > Ted, > > >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. I was thinking about your response, and I wonder if we might be talking past each other. The concern that I think a number of raising about "send a postcard" specifically about patent licenses which are not sub-licensable, so that each individual end-user has to request their own individual patent license. Were you perhaps thinking of the scenario where only the a developer had to do is to send a postcard to request a patent license? If so, I agree that's much less of an issue, although it still could potentially be considered too onerous by some. We could construct some really extreme ways such a "Royalty Free" license could be worded that illustrates how our lack of definition of "Royalty Free" in the IPR disclosure template could come back to haunt us. Suppose a company declared that they would make a "Royalty Free" license available. If they subsequently published the the following, at which point would it be construed that they had violated the IPR declaration (of which I hope some lawyer has commented about whether or not it is legally binding)? "This patent license is not sub-licensable. Each developer and individual end user must travel in person to the MegaCorp offices located in Nome, Alaska, and apply for a royalty-free patent license, which shall not be refused unless you or your company has ever used or developed software which utilizes the Open Document format." If the answer is that a company could declare in an IPR declaration that they are offerring an Royalty Free license, and not make any promises for offerring RAND terms, and then could offer their patent under the above license without sufferring any legal consequences, I'd argue we have a significant hole in our processes. - Ted Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and not necessarily the opinions of my employer; I'm not important enough to affect the opinions of my employer. :-) _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf