On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:48 PM, Nicolas Williams
<Nicolas.Williams at sun.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 04:10:01PM +0200, Badra wrote:
> May it be possible for the draft's authors to review the related Certicom's
> patents and conclude whatever they are or aren't related to the document in
> question?
Absolutely not. A document author should _never_ have to do that unless
they are the owners of (or work for the owners of) the relevant patents.
Nor, to be clear, should the authors be required to produce such a
review (e.g., done by their lawyers).
If the IETF were ever to require me to do such analysis, in order to
prorgress an I-D that I'm an author of, when I'm not the IPR owner or an
agent thereof, then I'd simply refuse to do so and let the I-D expire
without further ado if need be. I'm quite certain that my or my
employer's lawyers would insist on that very course of action.
Moreover, I'd stop participating in the IETF altogether, and I'm sure
many others would too.
It's not fair even to ask the authors to do such a review if they feel
like it. It would probably be a dangerous expectation to set, that
authors should "volunteer" to do such reviews. Moreover, such reviews
would do everyone else exactly no good. Just because my or my lawyer's
opinion is that some IPR does not cover a given document cannot mean
that the IPR owner won't think otherwise and sue you if they think you
infringe on their IPR.
Well I am not asking the authors to do a survey on existing patents, BUT on identified ones, which are in our case Certicom's Patents.
If a patent is proposed to be related to an ID, it is for the authors (not the owners) benefits to do if they want to publish their document as ST since the owner may prefer to hide this info or to don't make a disclosure at all.
In ID, we usually found (I am not sure if this is still applicable)
By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any
applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware
have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes
aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79.
The above text doesn't make any difference between the owner and the author.
So if the authors is not the owner, BUT are aware of any patents related to that, they are requested to tell about that.
Badra
