Re: [NSIS] IPR Disclosure: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York's Statement about IPR related to draft-ietf-nsis-tunnel-13

I'm thinking about how much crap Cisco would get if we submarined a patent application for 4.5 years. We had an instance not so long ago where a lawyer got behind in his inbox (we had declared IPR on the individual submission but hadn't repeated it when it became a working group draft because Legal was buried), and we made the papers.

The disclosure states that this is free to use for open source uses while the protocol remains "experimental". If it moves to standards track, it follows standard FRAND policies. "FRAND" is of course an undefined term. It means that they will charge money; how much money and under what conditions is undefined; in the eyes of the entity charging the money, it will be fair and reasonable.

Frankly, making the IPR statement at this point in time is extortion. If I'm asked to comment in a court trial, my assessment would be that the IPR holder had years and years of opportunity to declare his IPR and didn't. Therefore, he appears to have intentionally held off stating his IPR until there was no other course of action reasonable for the working group than accept his claims, and as a result there is precedent for him to lose the right to assert the IPR.

On Dec 3, 2010, at 4:27 PM, James M. Polk wrote:

> With respect, this is crazy.
> 
> 11 months after the WGLC for this doc the authors submit an IPR statement?  This document has been a WG item since June 2006. Exactly when didn't they have time to come forward with a notification, say in 2007, or 2008 or 2009?
> 
> James
> 
> At 10:45 AM 12/3/2010, Jukka Manner wrote:
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> The authors of draft-ietf-nsis-tunnel have disclosed an IPR that affects the accepted, but not yet published, NSIS document.
>> 
>> We need guidance from the working group on how to proceed:
>> 
>> a) Do members of the WG accept those terms,
>> b) Do you want to redesign the protocol to work around the IPR,
>> c) Do you want to ask Columbia to modify the terms, or
>> d) Do we drop the document from the WG (authors can still pursue publications through the independent track)?
>> 
>> Items a) and d) let's us continue with the publication procedure (for item d) we just remove references to the work from the mobility applicability document). Items b) and c) will need considerable work and since the WG is closing, I would like to avoid them.
>> 
>> Please indicate your preference within two weeks, by Friday 17th at:
>> 
>> http://www.doodle.com/mb2gvfit64bnya99
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Jukka
>> 
>> On 12/03/2010 06:00 PM, IETF Secretariat wrote:
>>> Dear Charles Shen, Sung-Hyuck Lee, Henning Schulzrinne, Jong Bang:
>>> 
>>> An IPR disclosure that pertains to your Internet-Draft entitled "NSIS Operation
>>> Over IP Tunnels" (draft-ietf-nsis-tunnel) was submitted to the IETF Secretariat
>>> on 2010-12-02 and has been posted on the "IETF Page of Intellectual Property
>>> Rights Disclosures" (https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1456/). The title of the
>>> IPR disclosure is "The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York's
>>> Statement about IPR related to draft-ietf-nsis-tunnel-13."
>>> 
>>> The IETF Secretariat
>>> 
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