Handling IPR disclosures through draft reorganizations

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

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:

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>.)