Re: [rtcweb] Unified plan IPR

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Roman Shpount <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I did not want to blow this out of proportion. All I wanted to point out
> that that licensing terms are missing and until the licensing terms are
> clear this does present a certain risk. I do agree that given current
> active participation of Ericsson in this list, this risk is likely low. One
> other thing that I wanted to mention was that some aspects of the unified
> draft can be adjusted to limit the exposure to the declared IPR.
>

Roman,

That seems like something that would be useful if you could lay out in more
detail.

Best,
-Ekr

Regards,
> _____________
> Roman Shpount
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 6:21 PM, Adam Roach <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>>  The chairs have asked us not to cross-post. As this pertains to an IETF
>> IPR declaration, I'll speak to it here.
>>
>> I'll note that your response is a vast overreaction at this juncture, as
>> (1) these are merely applications, not granted patents; and (2) Ericsson
>> has not yet indicated their intentions regarding the licensing terms of any
>> patents that may result.
>>
>> In terms of your two questions: I'm not a laywer, so I'm not able to
>> speak to the applicability of the patents in any authoritative fashion. All
>> that I can really say is that I have a reasonable belief that the claims of
>> these applications, if granted, would apply to the draft in question.
>>
>> I will make one factual observation, without any interpretation, from
>> which you can draw your own conclusions: the independent claims of the
>> patent applications in question do not mention SDP.
>>
>> /a
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 7/23/13 16:58, cowwoc wrote:
>>
>>
>>     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
>>
>>
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