Re: IESG Considering a Revision to NOTE WELL

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On Nov 6, 2012, at 10:42 AM, Paul Wouters wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Fred Baker (fred) wrote:
> 
>> This note is rather lighter in weight and tone than its predecessor, and seems like a good direction.
> 
> Can you explain your reasoning why this seems like "a good direction".

Not being a lawyer, I can't comment on the legal details of IPR cases. What I am looking at is the understandability of a statement. A lawyer that I was speaking with recently told me that the IETF IPR policy is ambiguous; one must file IPR statements for standards, but not for informational documents. We wound up wandering through the details of legal statements, in which I felt he was working pretty hard to make words stand on their heads.

To my small and non-legal mind, the simplest statement is the clearest, and what the average IETFer needs is clarity. The policy is, as far as I know, that if I have or personally and reasonably know that my company has IPR on a document or statement of any category, I need to say so and encourage my company to say so; if someone else does, I am encouraged to make the fact known. Making that statement in any more complex way gives the appearance of complexity of thought, and this particular lawyer was finding complexity/ambiguity where no complexity/ambiguity exists. 

KISS.

> For example, how would the new Note Well improve our situation in
> the Versign DNSSEC case?
> 
> Link to patent: http://domainnamewire.com/2012/10/05/verisign-files-patent-application-for-way-of-transfering-hosting-on-dnssec-domains/
> 
> Comparison of Patent vs IETF work: http://ubuntuone.com/4Bz1BqOsGMkTUQgViEL0rz
> 
> Paul

----------------------------------------------------
The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially. 
   - Marshall McLuhan




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