Re: Withdrawal of Approval and Second Last Call: draft-housley-tls-authz-extns

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb at cs.columbia.edu>]

On Thu, 29 Mar 2007 17:12:18 +0200
Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org> wrote:


> The community needs to evaluate patent claims, and preferably reach
> conservative agreement (rough consensus is not good enough) on whether
> we should care about a particular patent or not.  Input to that
> community evaluation process may be documentation of legal actions
> taken by a patent owner.  Sometimes that may happen only after a
> document has been published.
> 
> I would support down-grading standards track documents that later turn
> out to be patent-infected to informational.  Doing so would avoid
> sending a message that the IETF supports patented technology, when the
> IETF community didn't know about the patents at publication time.  For
> credibility of the process, I believe it is important that these
> decisions are only made based on publicly available information.
> 

To be consistent with IETF process and IPR policy, I think that the only
way to do that is via a "standards action" -- an IETF consensus call
(often preceeded by a WG discussion and last call) to downgrade the
document.  Reclassifying documents as Historic is done by separate RFCs
-- I suspect that that's the mechanism that would have to be followed
here.

Look at it this way -- we give WGs the right to standardize encumbered
technologies.  If we're to later reject technologies because they've
become encumbered, it's really a case of going through the same sort of
decision process.  



		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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