Re: ipr-wg was Proposal to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email

[Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]>]

Le 20/06/2022 à 09:03, Brian Carpenter a écrit :
> IMHO the absence of IPR relevant to a particular specification is a 
> negative that is impossible to prove.

Yes, I agree.

But it would be good to have a good picture of the IPR situation on a
particular document at a given time, if someone wants to make a new IPR
declaration after some years.

Of course, one might wonder why would one come back years after to make
IPR disclosures.  After all, if the lawyers and the markets were not
called during all this time, maybe it makes no sense to declare more 10
years later, when the rights might have expired too.

Maybe it is for the sake of the technicality, or of completeness.

There are probably other reasons as to why IPR disclosures could be made
later.

Making IPR disclosures is a sort of an 'obligation' as currently stated
by RFC 8179 ("IETF Participant's obligation to make IPR disclosures as
required by this policy").  Such obligation might scare some people away
in some contexts (it did scare me).  Because of that scare, instead of
contributing a technology to IETF, one might work privately on that
technology, and discuss at IETF the other non-innovative aspects.

Were that obligation rather formulated as an _incitement_ - something
like "declare, and you get in a list of well fame of declarers", the
"IPR directories ranking the organisations", then it would have been
different.

I dont find such kind of incitement in the RFC8179, but maybe I dont 
read it perfectly.

Alex

> 
> Let's see. Remember when traffic lights used rubber tubes embedded
> in the road surface to detect vehicles? Suppose somebody stated
> there was no relevant IPR. True or false?
> 
> Regards, Brian Carpenter (via tiny screen & keyboard)
> 
> On Mon, 20 Jun 2022, 18:53 Lars Eggert, <[e-mail] 
> <mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> On 2022-6-16, at 14:11, Alexandre Petrescu 
> <[e-mail] <mailto:[e-mail]>>
>  wrote:
>> Ideally, I would need to have access to all private declarations
> of IPR _absence_, not their presence.
> 
> most contributors cannot make declarations about the absence of IPR,
>  not even about IPR from their own organizations. (And in my 
> understanding, most organizations can't, for various reasons, 
> either.)
> 
>> I understand that all RFC authors are demanded during the last
> phases prior to RFC issuance to state what they know about IPR.
> 
> All authors are reminded during the final stages of document 
> processing in a WG that they were under disclosure obligations all 
> along, as are all other contributors. We do this, because in the 
> past, there have been rare cases where authors forgot to do so, or 
> thought their Legal department had done so but didn't. This reminder
>  is supposed to make it easier for people to follow the rules; but
> the disclosure obligations start when someone begins contributing.
> 
>> In the instances of RFCs where I was an author, all replies from
> authors, including myself, were such declarations of absence of IPR.
> 
> The question your document shepherd is asking you as an author is:
> 
> "(7) Has each author confirmed that any and all appropriate IPR 
> disclosures required for full conformance with the provisions of BCP
>  78 and BCP 79 have already been filed. If not, explain why." 
> (https://github.com/ietf-tools/datatracker/blob/5a31658b7f87054237430ee5fab8a23a8b32a7e8/ietf/templates/doc/shepherd_writeup.txt#L30-L32
>
>
> 
<https://github.com/ietf-tools/datatracker/blob/5a31658b7f87054237430ee5fab8a23a8b32a7e8/ietf/templates/doc/shepherd_writeup.txt#L30-L32>)
> 
> In other words, you are not asked to declare the presence or absence
>  of IPR. You are asked whether you have been following the BCP78/79 
> disclosure obligations as a contributor to a piece of IETF work, as 
> you are expected to.
> 
>> These statements are however not captured on
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/ 
> <https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/>
> 
> Correct. The result of such reaffirmations by authors end up in the 
> document shepherd writeups in some form, which are available in the 
> datatracker, but elsewhere.
> 
>> As such, when this URL says "The IETF Datatracker maintains a
> list of IPR disclosures made to the IETF." - could be improved.
>> 
>> Because not all IPR disclosures made to the IETF are there (e.g.
> the declarations of absence of IPR are not there).
> 
> That's because an "IPR disclosure" is a carefully-defined term, and 
> your interpretation goes beyond that definition. You might want to 
> re-read Section 5 of BCP79: 
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8179.html#section-5 
> <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8179.html#section-5>
> 
> Thanks, Lars
> 
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