Re: [TLS] Proto write-up for TLS exporter

[Martin Rex <Martin.Rex at sap.com>]

Nicolas Williams wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 06:20:12PM +0200, Badra wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> You clearly missed the point.  My advice w.r.t. other people's patents
> is worthless to anyone but my employer or myself, and since I'm not an
> IPR lawyer my advice on such matters (beyond "go talk to your lawyers")
> is utterly worthless.  Why would ask me, or anyone else, for it, then?
> 
> Would you really risk your business on my legal advice when we have no
> business relationship at all?
> 
> Worse, forcing one to come up with such advice and publish it would be
> detrimental to one's legal position should one get sued.  Which is why
> any sensible authors should (would!) simply stop participating if your
> suggestion were IETF policy, or even just WG policy.


I also have a serious problem with asking document authors or
IETF participants to read specific patents and advise on their
applicability.


My employer has explicitly asked us software engineers to NOT read
any (software) patents at all (and has blocked some well-known
patent databases for that reason on our company web proxy).

IIRC the reason is the US approach to patents where
"willful infringement" results in extra punitive damages
(was it something like 3x).  If one is infringing on IPR,
it is cheaper when not knowing about the infringement
before being sued.

So all I know about the Certicom ECC patents is what has been
said by people from Certicom on IETF Meetings (somewhere around 97/98
in PKIX and TLS) or on IETF working group mailing lists, and
at most the IPR disclosures listed on the IETF Web Server.


And btw., I have serious problems reading patents anyway,
particularly those written in english (not my native language).
The few US patents I ever looked at were almost completely
incomprehensible to me (from a technical standpoint what
they actually describe).


-Martin