RFC 3669 (rfc3669) - Page 4 of 17

Guidelines for Working Groups on Intellectual Property Issues

RFC 3669                   WG IPR Guidelines               February 2004


   written to help in making that decision.  We want to build a
   conceptual framework, a new set of "common knowledge", to make it
   easier for working groups to deal with intellectual property issues.

   To do so, we first present "case studies" in Section 4 -- real events
   that have happened in recent years, and how different working groups
   dealt with them -- plus notes on possible lessons to be learned.  In

   Section 5, we expand on these lessons and try to extract general
   principles.

4.  Case Studies

   The best way to know what works in dealing with IPR is to look at
   past attempts to do so.  The following are selected as cases from
   which general lessons might be extracted.  Other lessons might be
   extracted from other cases, but the cases below cover the important
   ones.

4.1.  PPP CCP and ECP

   The PPP Working Group adopted technology for PPP's Connection Control
   Protocol and Encryption Control Protocol about which an IPR
   disclosure had been received.  They indicated to the IESG that they
   believed the patented technology was the best approach, and was
   better than no standards at all.

   At that time, under the policies documented in RFC 1602 [1] (the
   precursor to RFC 2026), progress on any standard was to stop at the
   Proposed Standard phase until specific assurances about licensing
   terms could be obtained from all IPR claimants.  However, as
   described in RFC 1915 [3], in the case of PPP ECP and CCP, the IPR
   claimant balked at the requirement for specific assurances.

   In the end, with support from the working group, the variance
   procedure described in RFC 1871 [2] was followed to grant an
   exception to the RFC 1602 requirements.  If it had not been granted,
   the ECP and CCP standards could have been blocked permanently.

   Lessons:

   o  IPR claimants, even when their intentions are good, may strongly
      resist being forced to make specific public statements about
      licensing terms.  If explicit statements of licensing terms are
      required, then the publicly stated terms will probably be
      "worst-case", which would provide little useful information.





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