Re: Some cautionary comments

[Fred Douglis <douglis@research.att.com>]

Mark,

I'd like to belatedly add another cautionary comment (from some recent
personal experience).

If you recall, a bunch of us on one of the early Content Alliance calls
agreed that we each had intellectual property that would bear on
various I-Ds, and we would disclose them at the appropriate time, which
you asserted was not yet upon us.  I now believe you were mistaken...

I have recently been informed that in fact, one should include such
claims of intellectual property at the earliest possible moment,
including in the early I-D stage.  Making a verbal statement among a
small group of early participants won't of course cover the larger
group in the context of the IETF, so my understanding is that it's
important to add these intellectual property claims to any current or
future I-Ds at the earliest opportunity.

I'm further told:

As an example of a statement within an I-D
consider the following draft
     http://search.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-vrrp-spec-v2-05.txt ;
which simply states within its IPR section:

   "The IETF has been notified of intellectual property rights claimed in
   regard to some or all of the specification contained in this
   document.  For more information consult the online list of claimed
   rights."

Regarding the claimed rights, someone else said:

To my knowledge, the minimum statement required is along the lines of
"[Company X] believes that it has some intellectual property which may
apply to draft-xxx".  

RFC 2026 contains the details.

Bottom line: I think it's time to get such claims into the CDI I-Ds,
if not past time.  (I don't believe I've seen them so far, but I
haven't looked recently.)

Fred