Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2014 13:12:29 -0500 (EST)
From: worley@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dale R. Worley)
Message-ID: <201401281812.s0SICTXk3778564@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
| Indeed, if the IETF didn't have this rule, a company with undisclosed
| IPR could hire consultants, put them under NDA, and have them advocate
| at the IETF to include the IPR in standards.
Much easier, for such nefarious company, is simply to hire (as employees, or
consultants, it makes no difference) people to "represent" the company's
interest at the IETF, and make sure that those people are unaware of any
and all IPR claims that the company may possess.
In that case, the person attending the IETF cannot possibly disclose the
IPR, as they're unaware of it, the company can't be expected to disclose
anything - companies don't attend the IETF (except as sponsors perhaps, and
I am fairly sure that no-one asks the sponsors to reveal all their IPR before
we take their money) the people all attend as individuals.
We may not like this kind of behaviour, but other than completely changing
the way the IETF is designed to operate (to actually have company's explicitly
become members, and enter into membership agreements, with only representatives
of member companies permitted to participate) which I don't think anyone wants,
there really is nothing that can be done about it.
Now this by no means guarantees that the courts won't take a dim view of
this kind of behaviour, if an attempt is later made to enforce the IPR claim,
but it won't be because of any breach of IETF rules - there hasn't been any
in this scenario.
All of these problems are brought about by yet another instance of the
IETF attempting to fix something that is simply way outside our competence
or ability to fix. It isn't surprising - after all, the IETF is made up
(mostly) of engineers, and when an engineer sees something broken, the
natural inclination is to attempt to fix it. But sometimes the underlying
problem is something that simply cannot be fixed by any amount of engineering.
Hidden IPR is one of those, the problem is in people's attitudes - how
willing they are to put their own interests ahead of the general community
interest. You simply cannot engineer a fix to this, it is a social issue.
Everything beyond simply encouraging people to disclose any IPR that they're
aware of, which they are able to disclose - or if unable, to attempt to
encourage those who are able to disclose it, is beyond what is rational for
the IETF to attempt to do, and what's more, the "rules" that people spend
so much time debating (people waste so much time debating) are essentially
useless, as they have no enforcement mechanism. What exactly is the IETF
supposed to do, if it is revealed, some time later, that some IPR was not
disclosed by a participant in some discussions that they could have
disclosed? As I understand it, there is simply some hope that some court
will use that to invalidate the IPR claim - but nothing I've seen suggests
that the "rule" is actually necessary for that, and even if it is, as above,
it is trivial to work around.
These days the IETF is spending far too much time on issues that have nothing
to do with actually improving the protocols in use on the internet, and
should go back to doing what it can do, and simply allow the rest to be
handled in the places designed to handle such things. Stepping back, and
saying "I cannot fix that problem" seems like being defeated, but it isn't,
it is just accepting reality. That is good engineering.
kre