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Re: [Rmt] IPR statement in RFC 3450

Title: Re: [Rmt] IPR statement in RFC 3450
All,

I discussed this with Mike and Lorenzo.

First, our belief is that the statement in RFC3450 is incorrect: there was no IPR disclosure filed against RFC3450 and certainly there was no disclosure filed against RFC3450 by Digital Fountain.

Secondly, we do not believe Digital Fountain had any IPR that should have led to such a disclosure, either for RFC3450 or for the new ALC draft.

We do not know of any other IPR and so we believe the absence of any IPR disclosures in the IETF database is a correct reflection of the IPR situation for ALC (this belief obviously being much stronger for the specific case of Digital Fountain IPR).

As for the question of why the statement is there in RFC3450: the very early drafts, for example http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rmt-pi-alc-01, contained explicit notes about the existence of Digital Fountain IPR on FEC coding and congestion control technologies that were also being discussed in RMT. I think at that time it was probably not completely clear how the FEC coding and congestion control would evolve separately and in relation to ALC and so in the interests of complete openness this kind of explicit statement was included in these early drafts. It was later modified (for example in http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-rmt-pi-alc-02) to say that “ALC may be used with congestion control and other protocols, ..., which have pending or granted patents” i.e. to caution readers that there may be IPR associated with things that might be used with ALC, but which are not required for ALC itself.

This cautionary statement was changed during the publication process to the standard boilerplate that is in the RFC and it is our guess (and no more, since this was all a long time ago) that this change was made in error.

It should be noted that as a result of a very recent WG decision, the new ALC draft does require support for Wave and Equation Based Rate Control, RFC3738, in which Digital Fountain did have IPR which is now owned by Qualcomm and that Qualcomm has filed an IPR disclosure for that RFC, here: https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1182/, which promises royalty-free licenses to all implementors.

Regards,

Mark

On 10/22/09 10:25 AM, "Magnus Westerlund" <magnus.westerlund at ericsson.com> wrote:

Hi,

In the IESG review Cullen raised the issue about the statement in RFC 3450:

7.  Intellectual Property Issues

   The IETF has been notified of intellectual property rights claimed in
   regard to some or all of the specification contained in this
   document.  For more information consult the online list of claimed
   rights.

This indicates that there should be an IPR disclosure regarding RFC
3450, and that likely also applies to draft-ietf-rmt-pi-alc-revised
also. Can anyone in the WG please shed some light on the statement and
if there should be a IPR disclosue also on draft-ietf-rmt-pi-alc-revised?

Thanks

Magnus Westerlund

IETF Transport Area Director
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