Subject: Re: [admin-discuss] Proposal to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email

From: "Adrian Farrel" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 20:40:00 -0000

Thanks for the heads-up, Jay.

I'm going to ask the obvious question: how many email disclosures do we
receive a year at the moment?

While authors have a responsibility to disclose and so can be channelled
into whatever process we want, I am concerned that we should not miss any
third-party disclosures. In those cases we need to be as accessible as
possible to disclosures since the people doing the disclosures might easily
be put off.

I don't suppose we get many third-party disclosures every year, and maybe
none of them comes via email.

Cheers,
Adrian

-----Original Message-----
From: IETF-Announce <[email-masked]> On Behalf Of IETF
Executive Director
Sent: 17 December 2020 20:27
To: IETF Announcement List <[email-masked]>
Subject: Proposal to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email

The IETF Administration LLC is proposing to cease accepting IPR disclosures
by unstructured email and making the existing mechanism of a structured form
the sole mechanism for submitting IPR disclosures.  We are now seeking
feedback on this proposal.

IPR disclosures can currently be submitted by one of three Datatracker forms
[1] [2] [3] or by email.  The forms are highly structured and the IPR
disclosures are stored in a database that can be both browsed [4] and
searched [5] using this structure,  

Email submissions, provided for historical compatibility, often require
significant backend processing and judgement calls from the Secretariat on
what data should be extracted from the email for each field in the database.
The volumes are small, generally only one or two a month, but on occasion
they are tens of pages long with multiple disclosures extracted.
Notwithstanding the low volumes, it is our view that it is inappropriate to
ask the Secretariat to decide what content to include/exclude and how to
represent it, for such a legally sensitive area and that we should not be
processing of IPR disclosures in this way.  Consequently, we propose to
cease accepting IPR disclosure by email.  

If you have any feedback on this proposal, please send it directly to me or
to the admin-discuss list before Friday 8th January 2021.

Any IPR disclosures received by email from now on will not be processed
until a final decision is made on this proposal.  Submitters will be
notified of that so that they can submit by a form if they choose.

[1]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-specific/
[2]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-generic/
[3]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/new-third-party/
[4]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/
[5]  https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/search/

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

_______________________________________________
IETF-Announce mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-announce

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:06:37 +1300

Adrian's question is worth answering, but IMHO whatever the answer, dropping the free-form email option is reasonable in 2020. It is also consistent with RFC 8179, which says only "IPR disclosures must be made by following the instructions at <https://www.ietf.org/ipr-instructions>." The following text needs to be deleted everywhere it occurs:

"If you wish to submit your IPR disclosure by e-mail, then please send it to [email-masked]..."

However, there is one open question. Does the following still apply?

"To remove an IPR disclosure from the list, please contact the IETF Secretariat at [email-masked]."

Regards
   Brian

---

From: "Paul Hoffman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 13:07:18 -0800

I fully support this proposal. As someone who reads every submission via 
the RSS feed for the repo, I know that some of the submissions are much 
less useful than others due to likely sloppiness on the part of the 
submitter. The purpose of the disclosure list is to be of value to the 
IETF, not to the (egos of the) submitters, Making the repo more 
consistent is definitely for the good of the IETF.

--Paul Hoffman

---

From: "Salz, Rich" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 21:23:18 +0000

Does the IPR web-form include the ability to mail a copy to the person who filled it out?  I would imagine some lawyers would want to have notification that they filed.

---

From: Jay Daley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:05:19 +1300

> On 18/12/2020, at 9:40 AM, Adrian Farrel <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

I take that as meaning the number of IPR disclosure created from the emails received and I don’t know if we’ve collected that.  I can ask if it’s easy enough to work out.

Jay

> admin-discuss mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/admin-discuss
> 

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

---

From: Jay Daley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:06:02 +1300

> On 18/12/2020, at 10:06 AM, Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

Yes.

Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

---

From: Jay Daley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2020 11:08:03 +1300

> On 18/12/2020, at 10:23 AM, Salz, Rich <rsalz=[email-masked]> wrote:
> 

I imagine so - I can ask.

Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email-masked]

---

From: Alexa Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2020 11:52:49 -0800

> On Dec 17, 2020, at 2:08 PM, Jay Daley <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 18/12/2020, at 10:23 AM, Salz, Rich <rsalz=[email-masked] <mailto:rsalz=[email-masked]>> wrote:
>> 

The process works like this: 

- Individual submits an IPR disclosure
- Secretariat is notified -- via an email to our ticketing system -- that there is a submission
- Secretariat posts disclosure to Datatracker
- Submitter receives an email (from Datatracker) notifying them that statement [NAME] has been posted to https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/. The contents of the IPR disclosure are not included in the email. 

Alexa

>> [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>
> [email-masked] <mailto:[email-masked]>
> 
> --

---

From: john heasley <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2020 18:11:15 +0000

Fri, Dec 18, 2020 at 09:27:11AM +1300, IETF Executive Director:
> The IETF Administration LLC is proposing to cease accepting IPR disclosures by unstructured email and making the existing mechanism of a structured form the sole mechanism for submitting IPR disclosures.  We are now seeking feedback on this proposal.
> 
> IPR disclosures can currently be submitted by one of three Datatracker forms [1] [2] [3] or by email.  The forms are highly structured and the IPR disclosures are stored in a database that can be both browsed [4] and searched [5] using this structure,  
> 
> Email submissions, provided for historical compatibility, often require significant backend processing and judgement calls from the Secretariat on what data should be extracted from the email for each field in the database.  The volumes are small, generally only one or two a month, but on occasion they are tens of pages long with multiple disclosures extracted.  Notwithstanding the low volumes, it is our view that it is inappropriate to ask the Secretariat to decide what content to include/exclude and how to represent it, for such a legally sensitive area and that we should not be processing of IPR disclosures in this way.  Consequently, we propose to cease accepting IPR disclosure by email.  
> 
> If you have any feedback on this proposal, please send it directly to me or to the admin-discuss list before Friday 8th January 2021.

I think this is a good idea.  I do not have negative comment on this
proposal, but on IPR in general.  I am of the opinion that IPR should be
required BEFORE a draft can be considered for adoption and allowed at no
time afterward.  If IPR arises after adoption, the draft should
automatically return to an adoption call - but much better to simply not
allow it.

I think that WGs should have the opportunity to consider restrictions
of IPR before they spend any time on a draft.  I have no interest in
improving a work that has unclear or restrictive IPR - not knowing about
IPR until after adoption or even later amounts to free consulting.  It
is not unreasonable to require a company to figure-out their IPR beforehand.

I have seen a few IPR that are open, but whose current and/or future
restrictions are unclear.

> Any IPR disclosures received by email from now on will not be processed until a final decision is made on this proposal.  Submitters will be notified of that so that they can submit by a form if they choose.
>

---

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2020 08:44:29 +1300

John,

IMHO your point is clearly out of scope for the admin list since it raises an IETF process issue. So I've have bcc'ed the admin list and, since we don't have an ipr-discuss list, added the IETF list. You said:

> If IPR arises after adoption, the draft should

Firstly, an adoption call is not a formal or required part of the IETF process, it is simply a pragmatic step that some WGs use (see RFC7221). So we can't have a requirement to repeat a step that isn't required in the first place.

Secondly, we have no power to "disallow" late IPR disclosures. Sometimes people only discover patents late, and do us a favour by notifying them. That particularly applies to third party disclosures, or patents elsewhere in a large company**. Sometimes people are legally or contractually unable to make disclosures until their employer decides to publish an application. I'm sure there are other cases too, such as when an IETF Last Call triggers a disclosure by somebody who has been unaware of the draft until then. We may not like it, but there will always be late disclosures.

Therefore we just have to deal with them when they arrive.

Regards
   Brian Carpenter

** Note that our rules do not require a patent search. From RFC8179:

>>    m. "Reasonably and personally known": something an individual knows
>>       personally or, because of the job the individual holds, would
>>       reasonably be expected to know.  This wording is used to indicate
>>       that an organization cannot purposely keep an individual in the
>>       dark about patents or patent applications just to avoid the
>>       disclosure requirement.  But this requirement should not be
>>       interpreted as requiring the IETF Contributor or Participant (or
>>       his or her represented organization, if any) to perform a patent
>>       search to find applicable IPR.