Re: [manet] Re: IPR issue for TBRPF

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Fred,

> My observation is my own, nobody else's, but it comes from someone 
> who has been watching the IETF for a *long* time. If you want to 
> guarantee a > scramble, say the word "patent", and if you want to 
> guarantee that the IETF > will proceed in a direction only under 
> duress, apply for one.

Let me quote a sentence from "A Novice's Guide to the IETF"  
http://www.imc.org/novice-ietf.html

"Sometimes, the patent holder is generous and promises to give all
implementors of a standard a royalty-free license to the patent,
thereby making it almost as easy to implement as it would have been 
if no patent existed."

That is exactly what SRI is doing. Our IPR statement contains the
following sentence: "If SRI's submission (or portions thereof) is 
accepted and becomes part of the IETF standard, then SRI will grant 
any party a royalty-free license under such patents for both 
commercial and non-commercial uses, to the extent necessary for 
compliance with the standard."  

Also note that ISATAP (in the NGTRANS WG) has exactly the same IPR 
statement as TBRPF: http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/ISI-NGTRANS.txt

This issue has been discussed previously on this list, e.g., see 
Ken Peirce's message dated 12/13/01.  Also, in a recent email from
Ken to you (Ken, you can chime in if you want), he pointed out that 
the patent (if awarded) is actually a *bonus* to TBRPF implementors, 
since SRI will give all implementors a royalty-free license if 
TBRPF becomes a standard.  As Ken noted (and our lawyer agrees), 
in addition to guaranteeing that TBRPF will be unencumbered, it also 
provides some protection to TBRPF implementors from 3rd party 
infringement lawsuits.

In your response to Ken, you stated that it is very unlikely that our 
lawyers will let us concede our rights to TBPRF.  This is not true.
In fact our lawyers are the ones who wrote the IPR statement.

Our lawyers are currently updating the IPR statement to clarify that 
anyone can implement TBRPF for non-commercial research purposes while 
TBRPF is being considered by the IETF, as requested by Joe Macker. 
(The updated statement will be submitted to the IETF in a few days.)

Now, if OLSR and TBRPF turn out to be equally good protocols for 
proactive routing in MANETs, then it would make sense to select the 
one that has no IPRs.  But *so far*, TBRPF has outperformed OLSR 
significantly in our simulations (and has other advantages that
I have previously discussed).  These simulations are based
on the OLSR code that is available from the INRIA web site, which 
has been outdated for several months (according to Clausen's 
message dated 11/29/01), so I hope that newer OLSR code will
be available soon.

Richard

P.S. For reference, here is the excerpt from 
draft-baker-manet-review-01.txt that I think is unfair:

  "SRI has aggressively marketed TBRPF and
  its IPRs to the working group.  The fact that a patent has been
  applied for on certain aspects is, however, severely limiting
  politically.  If there is any way in which the IETF is absolutely
  predictable, it is that when confronted with a choice between a
  proposal encumbered with IPR issues and an unencumbered proposal, it
  will choose the unencumbered one."


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