Subject: [Fecframe] Concerning Qualcomm's US Patent 7,660,245 and FECFRAME

From: Vincent Roca <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:58:50 +0100

Hello Everybody,

*FYI and in order to comply with RFC 3979's rules concerning IPR*

To the question of possible patents that could apply to the FECFRAME
framework, Mark Watson answered in a private email in March 2009 that
no patent from Qualcomm apply to the current draft-ietf-fecframe-framework.
So there's no problem.

However...

Let's imagine:
   - you want to protect source packets coming from a streaming application;
   - you create FEC source packets, as in FECFRAME;
   - you have a system that segments the various source packets into a
     *potentially different* number of source symbols (e.g. because source
     packets have significantly different sizes);
   - you perform FEC encoding from this source block and produce repair
     symbols;
   - and you generate one or more FEC repair packets from these repair
     symbols, as in FECFRAME;

... then you'd better have a look to Qualcomm's US Patent 7,660,245
(e.g. Claim 1):
     http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7660245.pdf

This patent has been published in February 2010 and was previously an
"unpublished pending patent", so I only discovered it after Mike's
clarification a few weeks ago.

With that in mind, if I read draft-ietf-fecframe-framework once again,
I now understand why Section 6.2. "Structure of the source block" does
not go into details. Admittedly the way the source block is created is FEC
Scheme specific (I fully agree), but it's clearly not the only reason.

Mike/Mark, is my understanding of the situation correct?

Regards,

     Vincent

---

From: "Luby, Michael" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:33:17 -0700

Hi Vincent,
In the original individual submission of the FECFRAME framework document (draft-watson-tsvwg-fec-sf-00) there was some Digital Fountain/Qualcomm IPR (and we declared this at the time).  As you might recall, there was pressure in the FECFRAME group to remove known IPR from the FECFRAME framework document, and to make the FECFRAME framework document more of a high level document without FEC-scheme specific details.  When the FECFRAME framework document was rewritten and submitted as a working group document, certain FEC-scheme specific details were removed, some of which involved Digital Fountain/Qualcomm IPR, one of which you have identified below, and as a consequence there is no longer any Digital Fountain/Qualcomm IPR that is or will be declared on the current FECFRAME framework document.
Regards, Mike

On 3/15/10 7:58 AM, "Vincent Roca" <[email-masked]> wrote:

Hello Everybody,

However...

Let's imagine:

Regards,

     Vincent