Re: Handling IPR disclosures through draft reorganizations

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>.)
> 
> 
> 
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