Alexandre, In many or most cases, third-party disclosures are discretionary. Why should we make providing one so burdensome that it discourages people, especially people for whom it is optional, from making the disclosures. Let's just fix the form back to where it was or, if there is a good reason for not doing so, have that reason explained to the community and see if there is consensus that the action is reasonable. john --On Monday, July 22, 2019 16:42 +0200 Alexandre Petrescu <alexandre.petrescu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Le 22/07/2019 à 15:55, Stewart Bryant a écrit : >> >> I need to file a third partly IPR disclosure on work that I >> did with a previous employer. >> >> I went to the third party disclosure page and input the >> information that I knew. I only know the Company, two of the >> inventors and the subject. I do not know the patent number or >> date. The form used to accept best effort disclosures like >> this, but now will not permit submission without the patent >> number and filing date. >> >> The form implies that failure to provide the patent number >> and date result in a non-conformant submission. >> >> What is the correct method of disclosing IPR when you only >> have partial information? >> >> - Stewart >> >> > > I would use the right keywords in a paying patent search > engine, come up > with the document number(s) and circulate that publicly on the > WG email > list, in a hope that the careful will do further search and > identification of relevance. > > Also, I would report the red starred mandatory fields as a bug > to the > implementers of the page (presumably > datatracker-project@xxxxxxxx) on > grounds that the Third Party concept (Tiers États, fr.) > carries an > approximation in itself: it means somebody else than the > important ones; > given such an approximation it would make sense to approximate > the > mandatoryness and remove some of the red stars. > > As a last resort, I would fill in a number that is, or looks > like, more > experimental (patent numbers follow a certain convention, they > should > cover somehow dummy numbers, maybe something like > "WO1970/000000 A1") > and as date I would put January 1st 1970, the Epoch. > > Alex >
