Re: PAC: IPR clause in CS 6

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

[tallen@sonic.net:]

| | I have appended below what appear to me to be the relevant
| | passages of the OASIS IPR policy (modeled very closely on the IETF
| | IPR policy and adopted by the OASIS board of directors last
| | December).  Setting aside the question of what we may think of the
| | adequacy of these provisions, it seems to me that this issue is
| | already covered.  At the very least, it would appear that IPR is
| | not a responsibility of the committee that creates a specification
| | but rather of the OASIS board of directors.  I therefore suggest
| | that we simply strike item 4 from our list of requirements.
| | 
| | Anyone disagree with this interpretation?
| 
| Sideways, yes.  The language drafted is faulty, as I argued long
| ago now, in that it requires formal notice.  The IETF language
| that OASIS counsel edited to arrive at this text requires the
| relevant body to act on all information at its disposal, thus
| avoiding the loophole created here that the Board can know of
| something but close its eyes to it.  So this language should
| be changed (back to the perfectly okay language the OASIS counsel
| mucked up).

I said

| | Setting aside the question of what we may think of the adequacy
| | of these provisions

I'm not happy with this language, either.  But I'm not happy about
a lot of things that are beyond the present scope of this
committee.  What I'm saying is that whatever problems there are
with the OASIS IPR policy are not ours to solve (at least right
now).  For better or worse, business decisions like this are the
purview of the board.  So I think that we are perfectly justified
in punting on this.

| In either case, the TC members presumably have the relevant
| info, and need to convey it to the Board.  So we can't simply
| strike the item, I think.

I don't think that the members of the TC can be assumed to have
the relevant info.  (This is a weakness of both the IETF and W3C
IPR policies as I remember them, too).  In W3C this leads to the
bizarre conclusion that official representatives should carefully
maintain complete ignorance of their companies' intellectual
property so that they can truthfully claim that they don't know of
any conflicts.  I'd rather avoid this if we can.

| And is it the Board that "advances the specification" under
| our new process?

No, but arguably it's the board that sets the IPR policy under
which the process operates.

I can think of only one approach that might work in the context of
the standards approval procedure: make a call for IPR claims part
of the membership review process.  We're already requiring a
three-month review period before voting begins; can we make a call
for IPR claims part of that?  This would at least prevent any
OASIS member from blindsiding the rest of us with unreasonable
licensing requirements.

Jon