Re: Last Call: <draft-farrresnickel-ipr-sanctions-05.txt> (Sanctions Available for Application to Violators of IETF IPR Policy) to Informational RFC

[SM <[e-mail]>]

At 20:09 09-05-2012, Randy Bush wrote:
>participants should not call for sanctions.  they should point out to wg
>chairs, or ADs FACTS about questinable activity, non-disclosure, ...

Yes.

>and so forth.  i hope that this is not a witch hunt.  that it is not
>creating courts and guillotines.  we should assume people want to act in
>a responsible fashion and provide simple gentle paths to be taken when
>that assumption fails.

There are times when it is difficult to keep assuming that people are 
acting in a responsible fashion given the high levels of 
unpleasantness.  The situation can be such that simple gentle paths 
are ignored.

Fred Baker commented  [1]:

   "I'm concerned about people bringing baseless accusations, as
    yet another way to DOS a WG with IPR."

It only takes an IPR disclosure to make the WG work difficult.  It 
seems that an employer was not keen about the WG creation.

There are currently three IPR related issues affecting different 
working groups.  draft-farrresnickel-ipr-sanctions-05 does not affect 
any of these issues.  In one of these cases, the IPR disclosure 
happened after the document went through a Last Call.  A company gave 
up fighting a claim related to that IPR after spending US$1 million 
on lawyers.  If you write open source software, you stay away from 
IPR if you don't like the users of your software to receive ransom letters.

If someone wants to ask for sanctions, the person might have to file 
a third-party IPR disclosure first.  It is unlikely that there will 
be any action under draft-farrresnickel-ipr-sanctions-05 unless one 
of the WG participants is listed as an inventor.

At 23:46 09-05-2012, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>Fair enough. I can't agree with SM though - as for appeals under RFC 2026,
>the person bringing up an issue really has to provide a factual summary,
>exactly to avoid witch hunts. It can be very short:

Agreed.

>    Hi, I noticed that US Patent 12345 was filed in March 2010, and
>    draft-blo-foobar was posted that June, and Jo Blo was an author
>    of both. It looks as if they describe the same method, so why
>    wasn't there an IPR disclosure in 2010? Would the WG Chairs consider
>    sanctions against Jo Blo appropriate?

That could be added as an example.

>Possible text:
>
>    Any IETF participant can draw attention to an apparent violation
>    of the IETF's IPR policy.  This can be done by sending email to
>    the appropriate IETF mailing list, including a short summary of
>    the known facts and, optionally, a call for sanctions to be
>    applied.

I suggested an adaptation of existing text from the draft based on 
Pete's comments.  I don't have a strong opinion about which text goes in.

 From the "island of stone money":

   "their island yields no metals, they had recourse to stone; stone,
    on which labour in fetching and fashioning has been expended, is
    as truly a representation of labour as the mined and minted coins
    of civilization."

    The German Government wanted the paths or highways, which were in
    bad condition to be repaired.  The commands to the chiefs of the
    districts remained unheeded.  It was decided to impose a fine by
    sending a man to mark a certain number of the stones with a cross
    in black paint.  "This instantly worked like a charm"; the people
    repaired the highways.

History will tell whether there is a parallel between the above and this draft.

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg73287.html