On Sun, 2007-10-28 at 09:05 -0700, Bill Fenner wrote: > RFC 2026, section 10.4.(D), gives boilerplate to add to a document > where there is known ipr: > > "The IETF has been notified of intellectual property rights > claimed in regard to some or all of the specification contained > in this document. For more information consult the online list > of claimed rights." > > RFC 3667 removed this policy, because the absence of a notice in the > document doesn't mean that an ipr claim wasn't filed after the RFC was > published. A notice can only tell you that there is a claim, but the > absence of a notice only means that there was no claim at the time of > publication, not that there is no claim. IANAL, but my understanding is that the US patent system has a feature which rewards ignorance and penalizes knowledge: a plaintiff can get "treble" (triple) damages if they can show "willful" infringment -- in other words, if they can show that an infringer was aware of the patent. So notices of this form may help plaintiffs recover more damages in the event of a suit. Given that the boundaries of many/most software patents are vague, and the statements made in IPR disclosures also tend to be vague, it's not at all clear that these notices can protect implementors from being sued for infringement. So who benefits most from the notice? IMHO, it's the people who hold patents, rather than people who want to build things. The same can be said for the current FSF campaign targetting this list: by widely publicizing one or more patents, it makes it much harder for anyone charged with infringement to say they were unaware of the claims. If anyone's counting: I reject denial-of-service attacks on the IETF. I support publication of tls-authz as Experimental. - Bill _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf