On 27/01/2012 01:50, Barry Leiba wrote:
[...]
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 12:37 PM, John C Klensin <john-ietf@xxxxxxx>
wrote:>> We were told by the other company employees who facilitated
the disclosures, at the time of the disclosures, that this was>> strictly an individual's failure to comply with the IETF IPR>> Policy, that the author in question claims not to have>> understood the IETF IPR Policy, and that the company proceeded>> to make these disclosures as soon as it discovered that this>> IPR existed. I have no information to contradict that claim.>> Excellent. I had hoped that was the situation. It obviously> makes things much easier (and some of my earlier comments> irrelevant). With all the effort we go to ("Note Well" and> otherwise) to be sure that people are informed about the policy,> I have trouble generating sympathy for someone who says "didn't> underatand", but that is another matter (and perhaps just my> problem).
That is, indeed the situation. Qian Sun, the original Huawei author,
got a new assignment in the company, and stopped participating in the
IETF a few years ago, after he and Alexey had started the documents.
I can't speak for him about why he didn't understand the disclosure
rules; as I understand it, he seems to have thought the patents didn't
need to be disclosed until the RFC was published.
I just want to add that I was not aware of the fact that Qian Sun has
filed patent applications, he didn't tell me.
(Not that it makes much difference, but in the interest of historical
accuracy: In one case I started the draft by myself and Qian Sun offered
to help with finishing it. In another case Qian Sun wrote a draft based
on text from my other RFC and was bugging me to help out.)
If the other authors from that company have already told us that
they were not aware of the patent application until very late in
the process and that they moved diligently toward getting an
appropriate disclosure filed as soon as they did find out, my
suggestion is moot.
Some time last year, Kepeng and I offered to work with Alexey to
finish the two docs, which had seen slow progress for some while.
Only when the documents were approved and in the RFC Editor queue did
Kepeng learn about Qian's patent applications. He immediately alerted
me. I asked the RFC Editor to stop publication (one was in AUTH48 at
the time), and alerted Pete Resnick and the Sieve chairs. Kepeng
pushed Huawei's IP law department to expedite the disclosure, which
they turned around in two days for us. I assure all of you that
Kepeng and I were blindsided by this.
I obviously believe you :-). As much as I hate the whole situation, I am
glad that this happened before the document got published as an RFC, not
after.
I was concerned about the (thoroughly unlikely in this case)
possibility that the other authors from that company were> personally aware of the IPR but had been, e.g., advised that> they were not to make the disclosure because someone else would> take responsibility for it.
Unlikely in this case, yes. I leave it to you whether you trust what
I say, but I can only repeat that we did not know, and acted very
quickly when we found out.
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