From: <john.loughney@nokia.com>
To: <opsawg@ietf.org>, <dime@ietf.org>, <radiusext@ops.ietf.org>
Subject: FW: Nokia Patent discussion FW: [Dime] First results on Diameter
vs. RadSec patent research:EP1147635
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 12:15:02 -0500
Hi all,
I was asked to forward this to the DiME, RADext and OPSA WG mailing lists.
Thanks,
John
Dear Stefan,
I asked John to forward this message as I'm not a regular on the DIME
list. I'm responsible for handling IETF related IPR cases in Nokia.
As you suggested, Nokia believes EP1147635, and other members of the same
patent family, are essential to practice RFC3588.
However, I do suggest that you, and other folks interested, contact your
respective legal folks regarding the implication of the existence of the
patent, in conjunction with our patent declaration. I do not believe that
Stefan's claim is correct:
Every implementation of the
Diameter base protocol will use the patented technology and
needs to either license it or will violate it.
In order to help the group to understand our declaration, please allow me
to provide a simplistic explanation. As for the binding legal language,
please see the declaration itself (cited correctly by Stefan in his
original email):
Nokia agrees not to assert those claims in Nokia above
mentioned patents that apply to the RFC3588 and are
technically necessary to implement this IETF standard
specification against any other party in respect of its
implementation of the specification, provided that the party
relying on this commitment does not assert its patents against Nokia.
Our licensing declaration is what is commonly known as a "non-assert"
statement. What it says is that if you don't come after Nokia with your
patents, Nokia will not use its patents against your RFC 3588
implementation.
Non-assert statements like this are widely used in the IETF, as they are
believed to provide sufficient defensive protection for the owner, while
still allowing implementers and users to exercise the protected technology
without a license and for free, as long as they behave similarly nice (i.e.
not going after Nokia with their patents). In that, non-asserts are
believed to be compatible with most open source licenses.
Feel free to contact me in private if you have more questions.
Best regards,
Stephan Wenger
Stephan.Wenger@nokia.com
-----Original Message-----
From: ext Stefan Winter [mailto:stefan.winter@restena.lu]
Sent: 01 August, 2007 15:28
To: radiusext@ops.ietf.org; dime@ietf.org
Subject: [Dime] First results on Diameter vs. RadSec patent
research:EP1147635
Hello all,
(sorry for cross-posting, this may also be of interest for dime)
when presenting the RadSec draft in IETF69 Chicago, I
mentioned the patent claims of Nokia concerning Diameter. As a
reaction, some participants claimed that RadSec itself
implements a subset of the Diameter features and may very well
itself be subject to these patents. So I started an
investigation in this respect.
I started the research myself by grabbing a copy of patent
EP1147635 by Nokia, which is claiming to affect Diameter. My
focus of the patent's examination was whether this patent
might also affect RadSec.
The content of this patent is, in short, that packets on a
network get tagged as "possible duplicate" on retransmission
in order to make the endpoint aware that the received content
may be a duplicate of a previous packet. It also provides a
mechanism to correlate the multiple copies even when the
packets took different paths through the network.
Diameter does exactly that, described in section 5.5.4
"Failover and Failback Procedures" of RFC3588: a bit in the
Diameter header, the "T" bit, is set whenever a Diameter
packet needed to be retransmitted. Also, Diameter packets
carry an end-to-end identifier that makes it possible to
identify duplicates.
This means that at least from my point of view, Nokia's claim
concerning Diameter is true. Every implementation of the
Diameter base protocol will use the patented technology and
needs to either license it or will violate it.
(Note: I am not a lawyer. This is just my interpretation;
consider my knowledge being "Slashdot-level").
From the wording in this section 5.5.4 and the explanation of
the T bit in chapter 3, it seems that setting the T bit is
mandatory on retransmissions, so adhering to the protocol
specification leaves no room for circumventing the content of
the patent (e.g., by keeping it 0 at all times).
Luckily, RadSec does not implement such a sophisticated
duplicate packet detection algorithm. So, this particular
patent appears not to be of any concern for implementors of RadSec.
I will continue investigating the bunch of other patents and
patent applications relating to Diameter as soon as I get
copies of them. For reference, here is Nokia's claim statement
concerning Diameter (as submitted to the IETF IPR tracker):
----------
Title: Nokia's Statement About IPR Claimed in RFC 3588
Received: January 6, 2004
From: harri.t.honkasalo@nokia.com
This is to advise the IETF that Nokia believes the Nokia
patents: EP1147635 and AU757984, and the related patent
applications: BRPI0007603-1, CA2360093, CN00804050.8, FI990102,
JP2000-595452 and US09/903863 may be relevant to Diameter Base
Protocol RFC3588.
Nokia agrees not to assert those claims in Nokia above
mentioned patents that apply to the RFC3588 and are
technically necessary to implement this IETF standard
specification against any other party in respect of its
implementation of the specification, provided that the party
relying on this commitment does not assert its patents against Nokia.
Regards,
Harri Honkasalo
Director of IPR, Standard Technology
Nokia Corporation
----------
Greetings,
Stefan Winter
--
Stefan WINTER
RESTENA Foundation - Réseau Téléinformatique de l'Education
Nationale et de la Recherche R&D Engineer
6, rue Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi
L-1359 Luxembourg
email: stefan.winter@restena.lu Tel.: +352 424409-1
http://www.restena.lu Fax: +352 422473
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