Re: FSF's comment on draft-housley-tls-authz-extns

[Willie Gillespie <[e-mail]>]

I don't know anything about patents and how they all work -- so I am 
probably speaking out of place.  Is it possible to just have RedPhone 
re-issue the Licensing Declaration with "better" wording?

Willie

John Sullivan wrote:
> The Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project oppose publication
> of "Transport Layer Security (TLS) Authorization Extensions"
> (draft-housley-tls-authz-extns) as a proposed standard. We do not
> think that RedPhone Security's 1026 disclosure filing provides
> sufficient assurance to free software users that they will not be
> considered in violation of RedPhone's patent. 
> 
> The Licensing Declaration starts out right:
> 
>> RedPhone Security hereby asserts that the techniques for sending
>> and receiving authorizations defined in TLS Authorizations
>> Extensions (version draft-housley-tls-authz-extns-07.txt) do not
>> infringe upon RedPhone Security's intellectual property rights
>> (IPR).
> 
> However, it is then followed by an important caveat:
> 
>> The values provided in, and the processing required by the
>> authorizations ("authz_data" in the Protocol Document) sent or
>> received using the techniques defined in TLS Authorizations
>> Extensions are not specified in the Protocol Document. When an
>> implementation generates the authorizations or processes these
>> authorizations in any of the four ways described below, then
>> this practice may be covered by RedPhone Security's patent
>> claims.
> 
> It appears that RedPhone's disclaimer covers software developers who
> implement the standard in a vague sense, but not the people who then
> actually use that software. A patent disclaimer must clearly cover
> both developers and users to be acceptable. Furthermore, the caveat
> is not written exclusively, leaving the door open for further
> claims. It does not say that the four ways described are the *only*
> practices that may be covered.