Re: [rtcweb] H.264 IPR disclosures (or persistent lack thereof)

[SM <[e-mail]>]

Hi Ron,

At 02:28 14-12-2013, Ron wrote:
>If we were making this an optional extra technology we can interop with,
>then I could sort of see how this might be considered out of scope for the
>IETF to be responsible for, but the drafts submitted wrt to H.264 are all
>proposing to make it mandatory for WebRTC.  Which means the IETF would be
>effectively coopting this as a standard, since anyone implementing WebRTC
>MUST implement it.  That would mean that it _is_ on the IETF standard track,
>(albeit by some back door) and as far as I can see, means it falls foul of
>at least 2 requirements at the present time:

[snip]

>draft-burman-rtcweb-h264-proposal even makes no reference whatsoever to
>the out of pool IPR held by Nokia (and others?), and seems to imply that
>the MPEG-LA subset is all that would need to be licenced.  This would
>seem to fall well short of even the bare minimum of due diligence
>disclosure to the working group.

draft-burman-rtcweb-h264-proposal-00 is not listed as a working group 
document.  I don't have a clear picture of the discussion about that 
draft.  As such it is difficult to form an opinion about how BCP 79 
applies.  I was puzzled by the lack of IPR disclosures on any of the 
working group documents given that there has been several threads on 
the WG mailing list about patents.

Regards,
-sm