Re: yet another comment on draft-housley-tls-authz-extns-07.txt

[Rich Kulawiec <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 02:21:33PM +0000, Bob Jolliffe wrote:
> It seems clear that, whereas the IPR Disclosure statement asserts that
> the proposed standard can be implemented without infringing on the
> RedPhone patent, from my reading it would be very difficult to work
> around parts 2, 3 and 4 of the disclosure statement to actually use
> the TLS Auth extentions for the purpose for which they are intended.
> This is very different to the scenario that others have described in
> this discussion ie. where a patent may be granted for a sufficiently
> particular, novel and innovative use of an IETF standard which might
> not even have been foreseen when the standard was published.

I'd like to express my strong concurrence with Bob's statement.
(I was drafting something of my own along similar lines, but he
has phrased it more articulately than I, modulo one typo that
I took the liberty of fixing.)  I'm deeply concerned that anyone
attempting to implement these will -- despite their best intentions
and efforts -- find themselves ensnared by a subsequent assertion
of IPR claims.  While I realize that this is almost always a
possibility, unfortunately, I think that we need to be much more
cautious with technologies where the probability of such an outcome
is thought to be "high" -- and this appears to be one of them.

---Rsk