Re: draft-ietf-ipr-trademarks-00.txt

[Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com>]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:

> --On 4. februar 2005 00:56 +0100 Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com> wrote:
>
>> In section 3, it says:
>>
>>    If no statement has been filed with the IETF about a term or phrase
>>    that is marked in a contribution as a trademark or service mark it
>>    is reasonable to assume that references to the term or phrase in
>>    product text, documentation and advertising material is permitted
>>    but that using the term or phrase as the name of a product requires
>>    permission from the holder of the mark.
>>
>> That paragraph seem unfinished to me.  "Reasonable" to whom?  The
>> suggested interpretation is not binding for anyone, nor is it the only
>> interpretation.  At worst, this appear to permit abusive or
>> discriminatory behavior wrt trademarks.
>
> My worry about not having any such statement is that it imposes a heavy 
> system burden in that one must choose between:
>
> 1) not identifying trademarks even when one knows that they are present, 
> thus hiding information in standards (never a good idea)
> 2) sending in an IPR disclosure for every trademark in every draft 
> submitted, thus introducing a new, heavy load on the IPR notice filing 
> sytem, dwarfing its important duty to identify patent disclosures, without 
> any corresponding benefit
>
> I believe that in all jurisdictions, there exist norms for which uses of 
> trademarks are "non-infringing" - I would like the document to reflect a 
> reasonable norm in this area.

That is what I would propose as well.  I think the requirement in RFC
3667 to acknowledge all trademarks is the source of the problem.
Exactly how to acknowledge trademarks is another problem, but
contingent on the first problematic situation.

Rather than updating RFC 3667 to be specific on how trademarks should
be acknowledged, I think it would be better to relax the requirement
to acknowledge all trademarks.

For comparison, RFC 1510bis has a similar issue.  There is no IPR
statement available, and the document acknowledge a specific trademark
owner.  RFC 1510 even forbid commercial use of the trademark.  This
complicate things for implementors.

Thanks,
Simon

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