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

[Alexandre Petrescu <[e-mail]>]

Le 20/06/2022 à 08:52, Lars Eggert a écrit :
> Hi,
> 
> On 2022-6-16, at 14:11, Alexandre Petrescu <[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)
> 
> 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/
> 
> 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.

Ah, that's right.

I remember the 'shepherd writeups' containing text such as "authors 
declared this or that about IPR".  For an RFC like RFC8691 it is there 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-ipwave-ipv6-over-80211ocb/shepherdwriteup/

One can see the interpretation of the shepherd of the IPR situation. 
But the original words the authors used, their manner of responding, are 
missing.

> 
>> 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

Probably my interpretation is wider.  I will read that URL.

Alex


> 
> Thanks,
> Lars
>