Re: [admin-discuss] Proposal to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email

Thanks for the heads-up, Jay.

I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many email disclosures do we
receive a year at the moment?

While authors have a responsibility to disclose and so can be channelled
into whatever process we want, I am concerned that we should not miss any
third-party disclosures. In those cases we need to be as accessible as
possible to disclosures since the people doing the disclosures might easily
be put off.

I don't suppose we get many third-party disclosures every year, and maybe
none of them comes via email.

Cheers,
Adrian

-----Original Message-----
From: IETF-Announce <ietf-announce-bounces@ietf.org> On Behalf Of IETF
Executive Director
Sent: 17 December 2020 20:27
To: IETF Announcement List <ietf-announce@ietf.org>
Subject: Proposal to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email

The IETF Administration LLC is proposing to cease accepting IPR disclosures
by unstructured email and making the existing mechanism of a structured form
the sole mechanism for submitting IPR disclosures.  We are now seeking
feedback on this proposal.

IPR disclosures can currently be submitted by one of three Datatracker forms
[1] [2] [3] or by email.  The forms are highly structured and the IPR
disclosures are stored in a database that can be both browsed [4] and
searched [5] using this structure,  

Email submissions, provided for historical compatibility, often require
significant backend processing and judgement calls from the Secretariat on
what data should be extracted from the email for each field in the database.
The volumes are small, generally only one or two a month, but on occasion
they are tens of pages long with multiple disclosures extracted.
Notwithstanding the low volumes, it is our view that it is inappropriate to
ask the Secretariat to decide what content to include/exclude and how to
represent it, for such a legally sensitive area and that we should not be
processing of IPR disclosures in this way.  Consequently, we propose to
cease accepting IPR disclosure by email.  

If you have any feedback on this proposal, please send it directly to me or
to the admin-discuss list before Friday 8th January 2021.

Any IPR disclosures received by email from now on will not be processed
until a final decision is made on this proposal.  Submitters will be
notified of that so that they can submit by a form if they choose.

[1]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-specific/
[2]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-generic/
[3]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-third-party/
[4]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/
[5]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
exec-director@ietf.org

_______________________________________________
IETF-Announce mailing list
IETF-Announce@ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce