Patents, IETF, and HTTP

RFC 2028 lays out the ground rules for participation in IETF working groups.
It might be good to review those guidelines:

#   To ensure a fair and open process, participants in the IETF and its
#   Working Groups must be able to disclose, and must disclose to the
#   Working Group chairs any relevant current or pending intellectual
#   property rights that are reasonably and personally known to the
#   participant if they participate in discussions about a specific
#   technology.

If you've participated in discussions about HTTP and reasonablly and personally
know about current or pending intellectual property right claims (patents)
that are relevant to the HTTP/1.1 spec, please let me know.

I think before we have a lengthy discussion about prior art, we need to
judge whether the patent is relevant, e.g., would an implementation of
the proposed or draft standard require a license of the patent in order to
implement the standard. And even if we might reasonably believe the patent 
isn't "valid" based on prior art, I'm not sure the working group mailing
list is the right place to discuss it, and certainly not the general issues
of patent law and its application to software.

This isn't our primary focus, which is to get the documentation of independent
interoperable implementations out. I hope we can close this off and finish up
any remaining issues prior to the next IETF meeting.

Larry
--
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Saturday, 6 June 1998 11:42:20 UTC