Re: [rtcweb] Unified plan IPR

["DRAGE, Keith (Keith)" <[e-mail]>]

In regard to your questions, I suggest you go read RFC 3979 (BCP 79) and its updates (as referred to by Adam) and then continue the discussion.

In regard to 1, noone in the IETF can tell you anything about the licensing conditions beyond what is stated in the IPR declaration. RFC 4879 says how you go about getting more clarity in the declaration if it is required. (But note the requirements of the declaration are limited).

In regard to 2, the IETF WG is expected to make its decisions based on knowledge of declared IPR, and the declared licensing policy.

W3C has (very) different IPR rules and you need to have that different discussion there for any requirements specified by W3C.

Regards

Keith

________________________________
From: [e-mail] [mailto:[e-mail]] On Behalf Of cowwoc
Sent: 23 July 2013 22:58
To: [e-mail]
Cc: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: [rtcweb] Unified plan IPR

On 23/07/2013 12:51 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
On 7/23/13 11:22, Roman Shpount wrote:

The situation would be a bit clearer if patent holders were to provide the licensing policy regarding this IPR release. Given that Ericsson is actively involved in this working group, I think it would be reasonable to ask them for this.

If process has been properly followed, the IPR holder has already been notified by the IETF executive director. See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4879.txt (section 1 paragraph 1)

I doubt agitating for action on these mailing lists is likely to produce useful results.

/a

Hi Adam,

    I'm a bit concerned about the optics of what just happened.

  *   The Working Group has been pushing for the use of SDP since 2011 (see http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/mail15.html).
  *   The first post related to the use of SDP in WebRTC came from Christer Holmberg of Ericsson on September 14th, 2011.
  *   One of the Chairs of the Working Group and one of the Specification editors are from Ericsson.
  *   There has been a substantial push against the use of SDP by some mailing list participants, but this was rejected by the Working Group.
  *   Suddenly we find out that Ericsson has filed two patents related to the use of SDP in WebRTC and these were filed *after* Ericsson actively pushed for the use of SDP.

    Isn't there a conflict of interest here?
    As a Web Developer who doesn't want/need SDP to begin with, I am finding this a bitter pill to swallow. I have no problem with other people using SDP (all the power to them) but, with this IPR discovery, forcing their preference on me will have real-world consequences (no less than had we mandated the use H264 in WebRTC).

  1.  Do the patents imply that Web Developers will have to pay patents when deploying application on top of the Browser or Native APIs?
  2.  Is there a way to retrofit the API so those of us who do not want/need to use SDP are not forced to license this IPR? For example, the specification states that the initial offer/answer mechanism is out of scope. Could we do the same for SDP?
Thank you,
Gili