Re: Handling IPR disclosures through draft reorganizations

I agree that the rules say that, and that was intentional on the part of 
the community.  So it should be applied by the tooling.

There is a potential implication.  I would hope that we would not expect 
corporate legal departments to track the changes in the drafts and file 
separate disclosures against each revision.  That would seem to create a 
lot of work for little benefit to the community.  I do not believe that 
was the intention when the rules were written.

Yours,

Joel

On 7/23/2023 7:52 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Jay,
>
> Are you aware that the IPR disclosure page apparently does not enforce 
> the very precise rule in BCP 79 that I-Ds cited in disclosures must be 
> referenced by specific version number?
>
> This seems to be a 9-year-old bug, with consequences as described in 
> Carsten's original message at 
> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipr-wg/Vr13La4lbl5Ck61ISlPC20V1Hmo 
> .
>
> Regards
>     Brian Carpenter
>
> On 20-Jun-23 09:08, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>> I believe that Carsten has uncovered a very serious situation.
>>
>> On 19-Jun-23 19:50, Carsten Bormann wrote:
>>> In July 2021, the CoRE WG split the draft-ietf-core-dynlink into two 
>>> parts, draft-ietf-core-dynlink proper (about dynamic link bindings), 
>>> and the separately progressed draft-ietf-core-conditional-attributes.
>>> It has been slow going, but we now have mostly completed work on the 
>>> latter, and would like to take up finishing the former.
>>>
>>> One situation that is a bit weird after the split is that the 
>>> original dynlink (that was including both what is now dynlink and a 
>>> previous version of the conditional attributes specification) came 
>>> out of an individual draft that has IPR disclosures on it:
>>
>> Up to and including IPR disclosure #2508 on 2014-12-19, disclosures 
>> against I-Ds specified the draft version number. For reasons that I 
>> have forgotten, if I ever knew them, disclosures since then have not 
>> specified the version number. That change creates the breakage that 
>> you describe, and I believe it's a *serious* bug - disclosures must 
>> be against a specific version number rather than against unspecified 
>> past and future versions of the draft.
>>
>> RFC 3668 (applicable from February 2004) and RFC 4879 (applicable 
>> from March 2005) were rather precise:
>>
>> "The disclosure must also list the specific IETF or RFC Editor 
>> Document(s) or activity affected.  If the IETF Document is an 
>> Internet-Draft, it must be referenced by specific version number."
>>
>> RFC 8179 (applicable since May 2017) is equally precise:
>>
>> "An IPR disclosure must include ... (c) the specific IETF Document(s) 
>> or activity affected, and (d) if the IETF Document is an 
>> Internet-Draft, its specific version number."
>>
>> I really hate to say this, but it seems to me that all IPR 
>> disclosures against I-Ds since 2014-12-27 do not conform to RFC 4879 
>> or RFC 8179. Indeed, RFC 8179 confirms that the change made in late 
>> 2014 was a serious error.
>>
>> If the disclosure that Carsten refers to had been correct, i.e. 
>> specified the version number as required, his problem would not 
>> exactly go away, but it would be tractable.
>>
>> Does anyone here know why we started to break our own rule in 
>> December 2014?
>>
>> How can we fix the ~3500 broken IPR disclosures since then? 
>> Presumably, we must deem them to apply to the draft version that was 
>> current at the date of the disclosure.
>>
>>       Brian
>>
>>>
>>> https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/?submit=draft&id=draft-ietf-core-dynlink 
>>>
>>>
>>> IANAL, but it very much seems the disclosure might be related to the 
>>> part of the specification that went into conditional-attributes.
>>> So, after the split, these disclosures are now associated in our 
>>> database with the wrong draft.
>>>
>>> The then holder of the patent claims in the disclosures apparently 
>>> has since decided to abandon those claims.  It does not seem easy to 
>>> obtain a formal statement from them to that effect (the abandonment, 
>>> however, appears to be easy to ascertain from the patent databases; 
>>> IANAL though); after all, there no longer is any patent claim that 
>>> needs to be disclosed.
>>>
>>> So it seems I have two questions:
>>>
>>> (1) How do we handle IPR disclosures that stick to the wrong draft 
>>> after a reorganization like the split we did?
>>>
>>> (2) How do we handle the absence of negative IPR disclosures?
>>>
>>> Grüße, Carsten
>>>
>>>
>>> (This could also be discussed in the more general context of 
>>> updating IPR disclosures, e.g., 
>>> <https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipr-wg/IHlcUZmeyanJ1f_hXKqu9yvSy_8>.)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ipr-wg mailing list
>>> Ipr-wg@ietf.org
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg
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