IPRbis, IETF 86, March 12, 2013, 3:20pm ET Eric Burger, Scribe BoF Chair: Russ Housley (General Area Director) Presenters: Jorge Contreras and Scott Bradner BCP79bis -- Proposed changes were presented by Jorge Contreras (see slides and draft-bradner-rfc3979bis-03) Bob Briscoe: What does 'covers' mean? Does it mean standards essential? Scott Bradner: No. Meant that if it is likely that the technology will infringe, then you need to disclose. Jorge: Section 1d of draft defines 'covers'. WHAT CONSTITUTES PARTICIPATION? David Black: reinforce concerns about obligation to disclose. If required to disclose just because you show up, lawyers will tell people not to show up. If participating, you do incur disclosure obligations. Kerry Lynn: Does signing blue sheet make one a participant? Scott: Open for discussion ... Joel Halpern: Do not want to be driven by what a lawyer can convince a judge. We should do what we think is right. Stephan Wenger: Making a contribution or influencing the consensus process in any way is participation. We want to encourage people to come. Sam Hartman: Want to encourage people to show up. Not sure why it is important as to why it is important for them to be in the room and not have an obligation. Sam's questions: How long is the participation to count? If I am in one agenda topic or the entire meeting to count? Is it one draft or all the work of the work group when I send a message? If I ask a clarifying question, am I participating? Sam's hope is that the answer to all of these is 'yes'; they should count as participation. Scott: this also addresses remote participation. Barry Leiba: Do not want people to run out if a sensitive subject comes up. Lars Eggert: (as IRTF chair) I want to make clear IETF rules apply to IRTF, which means the disclosure issue is even more important, as patents are even more important on the research side than the engineering side. Scott: Up to the IRTF to decide if they wanted to do something different than IETF; however it is a good idea to keep them aligned. Jorge: Not too wrong to have different rules as the bodies are different. Scott: Rooms next to each other, same I-D system, etc. Jari Arkko: I want it to be easy to not pay attention and not get burned. Scott: We do not maintain easy access to who is on mail list, other than who has sent a message. Jorge: it is discoverable information, but hard to show. Curtis Villamizar: Why encourage lurkers? Scott: We need their money. ;-) It was common for lawyers to tell people not to participate when RFC 2026 was written. Not sure if it is the case today. Bob Briscoe: Goal of IETF is to write standards not encumbered by IPR. If people are lurking and know the cash will come in, we should know we are about to get soaked. Barry Leiba: Wants it to be per topic, not per meeting. David Black: Disclosure obligation for just being there will inhibit random participation and cross-fertilization. Dale Mohlenhoff: Being at one meeting and not participating should not count as participation, but being there the whole time and not disclosing is not fair. Sam Hartman: I now agree that just sitting in a room should not count as participation. But I still think that if you participate in a part of a meeting, it counts for whole meeting. If it needs to be per topic, then need legal, archival-quality agenda, minutes, firewall separation of topics. Which is not realistic. Olaf Kalkman: Goal is for people with IPR to not game the system. It is easy to influence one part of a meeting, which in turn impacts a different part of a meeting. This situation makes it hard to say someone works on only one topic. Stephan: Do we need to nail down everything here? There always will be corner cases. For example, influencing is a vague term. The lawyers will be all over it no matter what we do, so it does not matter how specific we get. It will get litigated anyway. Lars Eggert: Current language is nice. If you participate, you must disclose. Period. Sam Hartman: I want to not be surprised. Stephan: The vast majority of declarations are against documents, not emails, statements at the microphone, etc. SENSE OF THE ROOM Russ Housley: Let's take a sense of the room on this topic. Is acting in order to influence the outcome of the discussion, and not listening or watching the action of others? That includes show of hands, writing, humming, and so on. Strong sense of the room that active influence counts as participation, but listening and watching does not. WHAT IS THE SCOPE OF A DISCUSSION OR AN ACTIVITY? Barry: Any system can be gamed. What is the scope? What are the tradeoffs? To what extent do we want to get expertise and future participation versus getting disclosure when relevant? Kerry: The job of lawyers is to cut up the pie; the job of engineers is to make the pie bigger. Let's make the pie bigger. Mike Cameron: A clever defense attorney will argue the individual should have known about something. Can we do anything about it? Bob Briscoe: If you think you are too scared to participate, how many do you really know about? If it is a lot, you should be disclosing them! Russ: There will be more than one opportunity for disclosure for something that will actually end up in a document. When it is in a document, it is straightforward how to do a disclosure. SENSE OF THE ROOM Russ: Do we want to continue to require people to disclose on any contributions to the discussion, where a discussion is the entire work group session, or something smaller? About 2/3rds of the people in the room think the scope should be the entire session; about 1/3rds think the scope should be more granular. Do we want to require provisional patent or pre-issue patent disclosure? There is a difference between claims and disclosure. Only claims are the legal part of the patent. Eric: are we going to require publication of unpublished applications? No.