Subject: Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-codec-opus-12.txt> (Definition of the Opus Audio Codec) to Proposed Standard

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 23:28:59 -0700

At 15:53 30-04-2012, Stephan Wenger wrote:
>This subject was also raised by our AD on the codec mailing list.  The
>statement is about spec text copyright (with the possible exception of the
>word "use", which is loaded in this context, see BSD license and implicit
>patent grant ambiguity).  Insofar, the patent licensing statement received
>appear to be irrelevant to this discussion.

Ok.

At 18:40 30-04-2012, Ron wrote:
>If this clause becomes a blocker, then we should simply remove it, but in that
>case it would be good to have clear reasons why it became a blocker, since the
>things you say you fear here, I see as already being prohibited anyway.

The text in Section 10 is ambiguous.

Given all the efforts that went into RFC 6569, it's odd to see the 
text being discussed during the Last Call instead of the WGLC.

Regards,
-sm

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From: Ron <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 11:10:37 +0930

Hi Stephan,

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 10:53:13PM +0000, Stephan Wenger wrote:
> The question of whether a section in the subject doc is
> the right place for such a grant has not yet been answered.
> My view on the latter: it's not.  One issue of having such a notice is
> that it expressly allows derivative work, possibly WITHOUT removing the
> IETF boilerplate and the TLP copyright notice first.

Except that the additional grant explicitly requires that:

 "redistributed modified works do not contain misleading author, version,
  name of work, or endorsement information."

And my understanding is that the sort of misrepresentations which you suggest
are already well protected against in established law.  So I don't think that
this would weaken the IETF's position in the event of such a thing happening,
and I'm not aware of any such problem occurring with any of the RFCs that are
already published containing such a grant.  Similarly there exist other RFCs
which already have external grants too, and there has been no hint of trouble
or an inability to prevent it if it arose with those either, has there?

I agree with you that this is an entirely separate issue to the validity or
other implications of any of the IPR claims though.  But on that note, have
you had any clarification from Huawei as to whether they believe their newly
acquired patent actually does read on this technology?  Last I had heard on
that there was some doubt and they were still studying it?  It would be nice
to have them officially clear that up.

Cheers,
Ron

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From: Ron <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 May 2012 18:11:07 +0930

> text being discussed during the Last Call instead of the WGLC.

Nobody raised any questions about it to discuss until Robert's AD review.
And since it's essentially the same text as had been included in previously
published RFCs, that didn't seem particularly surprising either.

Whatever resolution we arrive at over this, it doesn't effect the substantive
content of the proposed standard. And the question in question does seem like
something that's out of scope for the CODEC WG to answer in general anyway,
beyond giving the rationale for adding it in this case.

I'm happy to defer to whatever the broader community thinks will work best
on this one.

 Best,
 Ron

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From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 May 2012 12:10:58 -0400

For what it's worth, I support authors' (and this is actually one of the
few times I mean that rather than editors) right to make such a grant. I
believe the community is significantly better served by having
additional grants in the RFC, and strongly support us permitting them. I
believe our current policy allows them; if the community consensus is
that is not the case I support changes to the policy up to an
appropriate BCP to permit this.