RE: [security-services] Groups - liberty-architecture-overview-v1.1.pdf uploaded

["RL 'Bob' Morgan" <rlmorgan@washington.edu>]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, Michael McIntosh wrote:

> I am also not aware of specific IP claims, but the submission references
> that the holders of are committed to RAND not RF. According to the OASIS
> IPR Guidelines: "The contributor represents that he has disclosed the
> existence of any proprietary or intellectual property rights in the
> contribution that are reasonably and personally known to the
> contributor." However, the submission makes no such statement. Can we
> get clarification about the existence of any IPR and associated
> licensing terms?

If you read the words of the OASIS IPR Guidelines carefully, you will note
that the requirement is to disclose "the existence of" IPR, not the claims
themselves.  I don't know if there is well-defined practice on this point
across OASIS, but in the only other case I'm familiar with, meeting the
letter of this very minimal requirement, that is, simply stating that IPR
exists, was all that was deemed necessary.  That is, the statement from
Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSign regarding their submission to the WSS TC
refers only to:

  certain of their respective patent claims that such Author deems
  necessary to implement required portokions [sic] of the WS-Security
  specification

not to any specific claims.  This was reinforced by a note to the WSS TC
from a Microsoft representative:

  http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/wss/200301/msg00040.html

which refers only to:

  pending patent application(s) that include claims that are necessary
  to implement the Web Services Security contribution

There was discussion of this issue in the TC (see messages about "IPR" in
Nov/Dec 2002), and the statement(s) were accepted as sufficient in that
TC.

My reading of the Liberty Alliance statements as they stand are that they
meet the OASIS IPR disclosure requirements, as the statements by the WSS
submitters do.

I personally find these requirements to be appallingly minimal, permitting
IPR holders to hide what their real claims are rather than exposing them
to scrutiny.  But a battle to change this would have to be taken up with
the OASIS board.

I suggest also that this distracting discussion be dropped so we can focus
on engineering.

 - RL "Bob"