Re: [TLS] [Ietf-honest] Last Call: draft-ietf-tls-extractor (Keying

[Marsh Ray <[e-mail]>]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>     Seems to me that, in the context of asking parties to self-declare their
>     "IP", it's better to error on the side of overly broad terminology.
> 
> I think you may not appreciate how different these laws are.  There is
> no way copyrights can restrict the use of a normal internet standard.
> [...]
>      Someone somewhere is thinking he has a trademark on the first four
>     octets of a protocol message
> 
> Trademark laws concerns the way products are packaged and advertised.
> Since these are not packaging or advertising, I think trademark law
> doesn't apply to them.  I am not a lawyer, and it would be interesting
> [...]

http://www.chillingeffects.org/trademark/notice.cgi?NoticeID=203

> Basically, only patent law can prohibit use of a standard.

You've missed or ignored my point, which is not about actual law, but
about facilitating communication: different terminology suits different
purposes.

The main purpose of having the disclosure discussion in an open
standards effort is to prevent problems later. You want parties to share
everything that they think could be relevant, but more importantly they
have to not go away thinking that there was something that they weren't
obligated to disclose.

It may suit your purposes better for there to be an actual legal
confrontation in which you prevail, but for a standards effort anything
like that would be at best a major headache.

- Marsh