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Re: recourse if our rules are violated?

It seems to me that the timing is actually more important than the cases below.
if a patent that appears to be relevant becomes known before approval as an RFC, then clearly the WG should go back and decide, as the rules indicate.
If the patent becomes known after approval, but before publication, I would treat it the same as above, and get teh WG to decide if they think it matters.
If the patent becomes known after publication as an RFC, then we can not unpublish the RFC. We publish the IPR disclosure. The question is whether, assuming the RFC is standards track, we need to do anything. It seems to me that this can not be dealt with by a rule, or even an ION. The correct response is going to depend upon a lot of circumsttances, and the WG may not even exist anymore to be asked.

Note for those who don't live this: determining whether a patent applies to the practice described in an RFC is best described as an art. And probably as an indefinite art. I have seen patents applied, many years after granting, in ways I would never have thought possible.

John raised the question of a known bad faith participant. That seems a dangerous place to go. Without an actual court ruling, I can not see how we could reasonably take action on a supposition of bad faith. (That does not mean that folks can not be made aware of what happened, and that such may not influence reactions to other proposals from that source. But no official sanction seems practical.)

Yours,
Joel M. Halpern

At 12:49 PM 4/9/2007, Steven M. Bellovin wrote: 
The IETF chair, Russ Housley, would like the opinion of the IPR WG on
what to do when an IPR disclosure occurs belatedly.  There are three
cases I can see:

        (a) Intentional non-disclosure

        (b) Unintentional non-disclosure (which appears to be the case
        in the situation currently under discussion on the IETF mailing
        list)

        (c) Third-party patents that were not known to the WG or the
        IETF when the document was adopted.

Our focus thus far has been on (a), and our attitude has been "let the
government(s) take action" (see, for example, the Rambus case
( http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1161606920964 ) and the Dell
case ( http://www.ftc.gov/opa/1995/11/dell.htm ).  We've traditionally
assumed there was nothing we could do about (c), since such patents
could appear at any time

The questions, then, are these:

        Should the IETF have a formal policy?  Alternatively, should we
        leave it to the IESG's judgment?

        If we do have a formal policy, what should it be?

        Should it be expressed in an RFC or an ION?


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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