Patents and reality

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On Wed Jul 29 19:41:58 2009, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
I agree completely with Richard Stallman's responses to an earlier email. I repeat the relevant parts of that earlier exchange below. This reflects a
basic policy that should be adopted by IETF.

I'm not in favour of software patents, and whilst I don't do much open-source or free software these days, I'd certainly at least nod pensively at the suggestions that open-source implementations both help specification development and act as a good indicator of the interest in a proposal and the general health of the protocols.

I am also not in favour of burying my head in the sand. All SDOs - the IETF included most especially, as having set the standard to live up to - should primarily exist to document what *is*, not what one might want to be. It's often commented that the IETF, whilst good at refining designs, rarely produces new protocols successfully, and it's certainly not alone there.

It's been phrased in terms of "running code" before, by another Dave - I like to call it "documenting reality", or "not living in cloud cuckoo land".

The case where a patent is known from the outset, or even is known very early on, is often a case where the IETF *does* route around the damage. The exceptions tend to be where the specification either describes the only, or the only sensible, method for doing something.

Other cases, though, include cases much closer to the well-known UNISYS GIF patents, where a well-deployed specification turns out to have a patent applicable to it - or at least a patent potentially applicable to it.

In either case, the IETF essentially has two choices:

1) It chooses to throw away the core principle of "documenting reality". This is damaging in itself, because - just like producing avoidable specifications which have known patents - it risks having the IETF produce irrelevant standards, and thus becoming irrelevant itself.

In the case of PNG, it's my understanding that PNG only overtook GIF on the web due to technical superiority used by better displays, rather than patent encumberances - certainly when the patents were in effect, I saw lots of rhetoric, but lots of GIFs, too.

2) It documents what is, including that it's patented, and those participants who care about unemcumbered standards attempt to have the market route around the damage instead.

This strategy has two advantages - firstly, it works whether the patent is known from the outset or not, giving us a consistent policy. Secondly, it means that we can get on nicely with the pro-patent crowd, document the encumbered stuff, and then have the patents documented too - it could be argued as having the effect of sonar on submarine patents.

So, in summary, by all means argue against patents - I'm right with you, and so are a lot of the other participants here. But argue somewhere else - the debate isn't appropriate here, and many here see your rhetoric with pragmaticism.

Here, you need a working counter-proposal, that the market can then use to route around the damage. There's a lot of open-source projects that respond to many suggestions with "please provide a patch" - I encourage those interested to do the equivalent here.

Dave.
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