Effective vs intended handling of patent encumbrance in IETF wg and IESG

For your information:

In draft-ietf-dnsext-rollover-requirements, an IETF wg effectively made 
an a-priori decision to avoid the consideration of an IPR encumbered 
alternative; the problem area being DNSSEC trust anchor key management. 
I spare you the details of how the wg came to this decision, and how it 
relates to the a-priori rejected alternative.

Now that the IESG accepted the above draft for publication as an RFC, it 
becomes a procedural precedent for attempts to expeditiously restrict 
IETF activities to IPR unencumbered alternatives.

Conversely, it reinforces the economic incentive for medium and large 
organizations to isolate the individuals participating in the IETF 
activities from the patent application management process.

Also, the above draft publication decision, in a context where the 
problem area is still lacking a solution with a reasonable explicit 
security model, is an empirical observation of the IETF strong 
preference for "ignoring the technology" (instead of "ignoring the IPR") 
when a tradeoff has to be made. Inescapably then, the aggregate scope 
and field of application of IETF protocols is deemed to shrink as 
innovation enhances the networking technology.

Please note that I am not well aware of the detailed procedural and 
institutional arrangements that implement RFC3979, before the appeal 
process can correct deviations. While I was participating in the above 
matter, I chose not to rely on the appeal process, perhaps because it 
wasn't clear to me how things should have gone in the first place.

P.S. Since even RFC3979 itself is absent from the IETF ipr wg charter; 
perhaps the above is totally off-topic.

Regards,

-- 

- Thierry Moreau

CONNOTECH Experts-conseils inc.
9130 Place de Montgolfier
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Tel.: (514)385-5691
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e-mail: thierry.moreau@connotech.com

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