Re: Second Last Call: <draft-ietf-sieve-notify-sip-message-08.txt> (Sieve Notification Mechanism: SIP MESSAGE) to Proposed Standard

[Alexey Melnikov <[e-mail]>]

On 27/01/2012 01:50, Barry Leiba wrote:
  [...]
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 12:37 PM, John C Klensin <[e-mail]> 
> wrote:>> We were told by the other company employees who facilitated
>>> the disclosures, at the time of the disclosures, that this was>>  strictly an individual's failure to comply with the IETF IPR>>  Policy, that the author in question claims not to have>>  understood the IETF IPR Policy, and that the company proceeded>>  to make these disclosures as soon as it discovered that this>>  IPR existed. I have no information to contradict that claim.>>  Excellent.   I had hoped that was the situation.  It obviously>  makes things much easier (and some of my earlier comments>  irrelevant).   With all the effort we go to ("Note Well" and>  otherwise) to be sure that people are informed about the policy,>  I have trouble generating sympathy for someone who says "didn't>  underatand", but that is another matter (and perhaps just my>  problem).
> That is, indeed the situation.  Qian Sun, the original Huawei author,
> got a new assignment in the company, and stopped participating in the
> IETF a few years ago, after he and Alexey had started the documents.
> I can't speak for him about why he didn't understand the disclosure
> rules; as I understand it, he seems to have thought the patents didn't
> need to be disclosed until the RFC was published.

I just want to add that I was not aware of the fact that Qian Sun has 
filed patent applications, he didn't tell me.
(Not that it makes much difference, but in the interest of historical 
accuracy: In one case I started the draft by myself and Qian Sun offered 
to help with finishing it. In another case Qian Sun wrote a draft based 
on text from my other RFC and was bugging me to help out.)
>> If the other authors from that company have already told us that
>> they were not aware of the patent application until very late in
>> the process and that they moved diligently toward getting an
>> appropriate disclosure filed as soon as they did find out, my
>> suggestion is moot.
> Some time last year, Kepeng and I offered to work with Alexey to
> finish the two docs, which had seen slow progress for some while.
> Only when the documents were approved and in the RFC Editor queue did
> Kepeng learn about Qian's patent applications.  He immediately alerted
> me.  I asked the RFC Editor to stop publication (one was in AUTH48 at
> the time), and alerted Pete Resnick and the Sieve chairs.  Kepeng
> pushed Huawei's IP law department to expedite the disclosure, which
> they turned around in two days for us.  I assure all of you that
> Kepeng and I were blindsided by this.

I obviously believe you :-). As much as I hate the whole situation, I am 
glad that this happened before the document got published as an RFC, not 
after.
>> I was concerned about the (thoroughly unlikely in this case)
>> possibility that the other authors from that company were>  personally aware of the IPR but had been, e.g., advised that>  they were not to make the disclosure because someone else would>  take responsibility for it.
> Unlikely in this case, yes.  I leave it to you whether you trust what
> I say, but I can only repeat that we did not know, and acted very
> quickly when we found out.