Re: [rtcweb] Unified plan IPR

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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