Re: Leverage Patent Search API to reduce BCP79 related issues [was:

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> Russ Housley wrote:
> >
> > BCP 79 says:
> >
> >       "Reasonably and personally known": means something an individual
> >       knows personally or, because of the job the individual holds,
> >       would reasonably be expected to know.  This wording is used to
> >       indicate that an organization cannot purposely keep an individual
> >       in the dark about patents or patent applications just to avoid the
> >       disclosure requirement.  But this requirement should not be
> >       interpreted as requiring the IETF Contributor or participant (or
> >       his or her represented organization, if any) to perform a patent
> >       search to find applicable IPR.
> >
> > Your suggestion seems to be in direct conflict with BCP 79.


> IMHO your quote from BCP79 (page 4, bullet l.) is a very important
> point in BCP79.  I can not speak for others, but the Internet Proxy
> of our company blocks urls to all "well known" online patent search
> and patent publication sites (and these are the only blocked sites
> I've ever encountered) for the simple reason of the insane US patent
> laws with this 3-fold "punitive damages" for "willful infringement"
> of a patent, i.e. a patent that was known to exist when shipping.
> As engineers, we MUST NOT read any patents because of this.
> All of the patent reasarch stuff is done by patent lawyers exclusively.

I don't know if a similar block exists, but the policy is the same for us.
Such a policy, if implemented, could easily lead to various people being
unable to participate in the process.

> btw. I personally know only about one patent where I refused to be
> listed as inventor because I considered my contribution to it to be
> "obvious to someone skilled in the technology".  When I read the
> description after it had been processed by patent lawyers, I had
> serious difficulties understanding what that text meant...

A pretty common occurance, unfortunately.

				Ned