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

[Dean Anderson <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, Richard Stallman wrote:

>     Trademarks could affect a standard if the standard incorporates the
>     trademark in the text.
> 
> I don't think so.  You can write about a Ford car and call it that,
> without infringing the trademark on Ford.

If you are actually refering to a Ford, then yes. But if you _called_
your thing a "Ford", then no.  A standard on "Open Systems" might have
run afoul of Sun's trademark, had that term been successfully
trademarked. [Sun actually wasn't successful, so I'm going to use this
as a hypothetical example assuming they were successful.] A lot of
things are known to be trademarked and refer to known products.  But a
lot aren't so obvious.

Going back to the "Open Systems" example, if Sun hypothetically submits
a standard naming something "Open Systems"; and we didn't notice the
trademark; we approve the standard;  later Sun comes around to the
Standard users/implementers and says they are the only ones who can
implement/use the standard using that name, and show the trademark
documentation.  Then it would seem that the IETF has endorsed Sun, and
in anycase everyone else is screwed.

We would want a declaration that they don't have any trademarks,
copyrights, patents, or trade secrets in the document.  You are quite
correct that trade secrets aren't secret once they are put in a public
document such as a standards draft. However, in each of the patent
non-disclosure cases, the authors subsequently said they had secrets
they were trying to keep.  Well, if we make authors declare they have no
trade secrets relating to the draft, we can more easily catch them in
the lie.

		--Dean


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