How many Working Group participants who vent on patent issues have read RFC 3669?
Of those who have read it, how many consider it to be binding?
All RFC 3669 does is to allow endless discussion of topics that most WGs do not consider core. They may be important considerations but the Working Groups themselves are the wrong place to do design work in the IPR space.
Very few Working Group participants have any real interest or understanding of the patent system other than to wish it would go away. The most likely reason a WG participant would have detailed knowedge is if they were an unwilling participant in a patent lawsuit or had a proposal shot down because some group of lawyers objected to the IPR terms (both have happend to me).
The bulk of the opinions expressed might be characterized as ideological rather than informed. So what we get as a result is not a useful discussion, its more like a slashdot flamewa
Its not productive discussion, the arguments are entirely repetative.
Eliminating repetative, unproductive arguments is the function of the charter. We write charters that rule technical issues such as designing a new PKI, Web Services transport layer, cryptographic algorithm, &ct &ct out of scope. So why not rule the IPR question out of scope at the charter stage unlss there is a specific reason to beleive that a WG would need to deal with it?
A charter statement is never the final word, WGs discover that their charter needs changing all the time. If a group discovers that there are unforseen IPR issues it cannot resolve it has the choice of disbanding without a recommendation, rechartering or making non standards track submissions.
Understanding the IPR landscape is one of the things I always try to do before starting or joining a group. IPR is always a BOF topic. It is not that we don't discuss in advance. In fact in many cases the whole raison d'etre for the group is to create an unencumbered standard to replace a proprietary protocol.
For example, take a look at the Ford-Wienner key management patent which is due to expire at some point in the not so distant future. The invention describes a lightweight CRM scheme. I can well imagine that someone might want to start a working group to produce an unencumbered CRM protocol based on Ford-Wienner and S/MIME. The whole point of chartering a group of that type would be to produce a RANDZ protocol and so it should be stated in the charter.
I don't think that there are many cases where a non RANDZ IPR clause is going to fly. About the only one I can think of offhand would be that we are comming to a situation where ECC crypto is becomming seen as necessary for certain applications. There are credible IPR claims to at least some methods of performing ECC crypto. There are certainly parties that see a need to deploy ECC before the IPR encumberances expire.
The main objection to specifying IPR in a WG charter appears to be that it would prevent groups like S/MIME from considering ECC algorithms. While this would be true if S/MIME were rechartered with a restriction of that type I also think that its the wrong forum for the discussion. One WG chartered with applying ECC to all active IETF protocols would be a much more efficient approach and much more likely to provide a consistent result.
I can even imagine that a WG of that type might have a time horizon. Allowing technologies to be considered if they will be available on RANDZ terms after a specific date. That would create an incentive for the Patent Rights Holder to remove ambiguity as to which patents are covered and when they expire. This might possibly provide an incentive for the Patent Rights Holder to renounce rights to certain claims after the time horizon expires in order to get their technology adopted.
If we have two technologies on offer, A and B from different parties I want to be able to set up a bidding war between the parties to offer the most favorable terms.
The current IETF practice looks more like the prisoners dilema, the rules of the game cause the parties to chose the worst outcome. Axelrod's point was you can change the rules of the game.
From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [mailto:harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tue 30/10/2007 1:29 AM
To: lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Patents can be for good, not only evil
Sent: Tue 30/10/2007 1:29 AM
To: lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: Patents can be for good, not only evil
--On 29. oktober 2007 17:53 -0700 Lawrence Rosen <lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>
> The notion that each IETF working group has to approach patent issues on
> its own, without help, is silly.
It's also a straw man.
RFC 3669. You may argue that we can do better, but the argument that there
is "no help" is silly.
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