Re: Handling IPR disclosures through draft reorganizations


> On Jun 19, 2023, at 5:08 PM, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com> 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,

because it is possible that the “infringing” technology might have been removed in a later version  so all that could be said by
the IPR holder is that they thought that a particular version infringed

> if I ever knew them, disclosures since then have not specified the version number.

I do not know what that would have been removed - I think it should not have been

> 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>.)
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