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

[Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld at sun.com>]

On Fri, 2005-02-04 at 12:10, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> If a WG reached consensus on acknowledging a trademark, which I
> thought is what you said earlier for this example, 

That's not what I said.  

The WG was asked by the trademark owner/original author to rename the
protocol; instead the WG reached consensus that renaming to avoid the
trademark was unnecessary.

To my knowledge, since that point no new information has surfaced which 
would affect that consensus, and nobody seems to be eager to reopen the
question.

IETF working groups are not in a position to evaluate the validity of
trademarks, although my understanding is that many WG participants
did in fact personally investigate the question as part of deciding
whether to support or oppose the proposed renaming.

Even if 3667 3.4(e) were removed, we still have the second half of 
3667 3.3(a)(D) to contend with:

      (D)  ...  When reproducing Contributions, the IETF
           will preserve trademark and service mark identifiers used by
           the Contributor of the Contribution, including (TM) and (R)
           where appropriate, ...

As I understand it, trademark law puts a burden on trademark owners to mark
their own trademarks in certain contexts.  IETF documents are written
by specific, credited individuals; as such, they could well be interpreted 
as a statement by a contributor rather than a statement by the IETF as a whole.
Passing through trademark identifiers seems only fair.

						- Bill


_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
Ipr-wg at ietf.org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg