Many patents are filed for defensive reasons. Ie. If I don't patent it, then someone else will, and then I won't be able to use the idea I came up with. The other defensive reason is so that if company A tries to sue company B for infringing patents, then company B can threaten to sue company A back - and the end result of the mutual assured destruction is that no one ends up suing anyone else. In other words, patents can actually reduce the number of law suits out there. In many cases, patents are filed long before the technology is standardized - and, if disclosed properly through the IETF process, can be weighed when determining whether to adopt a standard. In some cases, the IETF may choose to adopt a patent-encumbered standard simply because it's technically superior to other options - and because the encumberence is not judged to be too much of a barrier to adoption. One great way to find out if the patent is too much of a barrier would be to label the technology as "Experimental" with the experiment being whether anybody would implement it given the patent encumberence, and if enough people can implement it, striking the right deals, then the technology can move onto the standards track. - Wes -----Original Message----- From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [mailto:ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Stallman Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 9:38 PM To: Nicolas Williams Cc: tls@xxxxxxxx; dean@xxxxxxx; ietf-honest@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx; ietf@xxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [TLS] Last Call: draft-ietf-tls-extractor (Keying MaterialExporters for Transport Layer Security (TLS)) to Proposed Standard The operative word here is uncertainty. A patent-holder creates uncertainty. How should an SDO respond? I'm not sure. I'm only sure that I don't like getting DoSed, either into dropping a standard or into not implementing it for fear of infringing. That's the nature of software patents: each one denies people the freedom to write and run certain kinds of software. This is why we must abolish software patents. Until we succeed in doing that, we can resist in certain ways. One of them is to refuse to establish standards that encourage their use. Generally speaking, standards are useful, because they enable people to converge what they are doing. But that ceases to be true when the use of the standard is patented. It is better to have no standard than have a standard that invites people into danger. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf