RE: [security-services] Liberty IPR Issues (was: Liberty ID-FF 1. 2 submissionto the SSTC)

["Conor P. Cahill" <concahill@aol.com>]

Philpott, Robert wrote on 12/3/2003, 12:17 PM:
 >
 > "2. Each Author commits to grant a non sub-licenseable, non-transferable
 > license to third parties, under royalty-free and other reasonable and
 > non-discriminatory terms and conditions, to certain of their respective
 > patent claims that such Author deems necessary to implement required
 > portokions of the WS-Security specification, provided a reciprocal
 > license
 > is granted."
 >
 > This promises that the "authors" of the original WSS spec that was
 > contributed to WSSTC will grant RF-reciprocal license rights to anyone
 > implementing the OASIS TC spec for any IP claims

I don't see "OASIS TC spec" in that statement.  I see a specific 
reference to the document that was submitted.  Now, there may not have 
been material changes to the specification so that this still applies to 
the product of the TC.  However, there is nothing in the statement above 
that says that should a "derivative" work be documented by the TC, the 
grant would still apply (and NOTE that I would not expect such a 
statement to be there -- it would be asking too much from the owners of 
the IP to make such a statement without seeing what you were going to do 
with the IP).


 > Now w.r.t. to SSTC, the submitters of the ID-FF specs to SSTC have NOT
 > made any statement regarding licensing to IP claims required to
 > implement any derivative works we create.

Correct.  And neither did the WSSTC disclosure.

 > As one of the contributors of the ID-FF specs to SSTC, I am willing to
 > make a statement that RSA will offer RF-reciprocal licensing for
 > implementing SAML that includes derivative ID-FF content.  If the
 > other  contributors also do this, then I believe we will have done
 > exactly as was done in WSS.

Not being one of the contributors of the specs to the SSTC, but being 
one of the contributors to the original specifications and being one of 
the companies who has IP in the ID-FF, we have offered reciprical-RF 
terms on all of the stuff in the liberty specifications.  We plan to do 
the same here in the SSTC once we see what it actually is that gets done.

However, I would be strongly resistant to making a statement that says 
"anything you do in the SSTC will be granted IPR to any IP owned by AOL" 
unless I can first see exactly what we are talking about.

Conor