Re: Renewing Working Groups, a proposal

On Wed, Jun 03, 2015 at 08:47:06AM -0700, David Singer wrote:
> > Upon joining a WG, a member has obligations wrt published items. If nothing
> > is published yet in that WG, there is no obligation yet. So if charters A and
> > B are for the same group, then everything published under charter A is covered
> > by patent commitment (possibly exclusion).
> 
> Well, that is the question that has been on the table for a long time.  If a charter expires, and a new charter is written for a group of the same name, and it is approved, and people have to re-affirm their commitment and re-join, in what senses is it ???the same group????

When we ask to rejoin, that's because a new commitment is needed (new Rec track
deliverables), not to re-affirm commitments for older specs.
A new member of the WG has to make commitments to whatever has been worked on 
before it joins (on rec track), so yes, in that sense it is the same group.


> PSIG has been divided on this question.  Chaals??? feels that it is the same for general purposes;  I think it???s basically irrelevant for the purposes of the Patent Policy, except for this one wrinkle, which is easily dealt with.

The real issue is when a group is closed for a significant time and then 
reopens (with the same name and of course a new charter), what happens to 
previous commitments? Much less clear than the normal case with the grace
period + re-joining system.



> > If charters A and B are for different groups (i.e. deliverable transferred 
> > from group A to group B), then the exclusion opportunity is similar to a FPWD
> > as soon as group B publishes the document again.
> 
> Right, as soon as there is an exclusion opportunity under charter B, we???re all clean. So the easy way to handle this situation (???inherited drafts???) is to trigger an exclusion opportunity at the earliest possible moment. If you do that as the group forms, then everyone joining will have an exclusion opportunity as they join.


When the PP was developed in 2004 I think the transfer of specs between groups
was not a common use case (not even sure it had already happened before 2004).
This case is not a Process issue, IMHO, it's relevant to the PP.

Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2015 19:43:53 UTC