Subject: [multipathtcp] IPR Disclosure: Georg Hampel's Statement about IPR related to draft-ietf-mptcp-multiaddressed-09 belonging to Asankya Networks

From: IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:13:29 -0700

Dear Alan Ford, Costin Raiciu, Mark J. Handley, Olivier Bonaventure:

 An IPR disclosure that pertains to your Internet-Draft entitled "TCP Extensions
for Multipath Operation with Multiple Addresses" (draft-ietf-mptcp-
multiaddressed) was submitted to the IETF Secretariat on 2012-07-31 and has been
posted on the "IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Disclosures"
(https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/1843/). The title of the IPR disclosure is
"Georg Hampel's Statement about IPR related to draft-ietf-mptcp-
multiaddressed-09 belonging to Asankya Networks."");

The IETF Secretariat

---

From: Mark Handley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2012 01:08:03 +0100

This one is United States Patent Application 20080062879 from
Raghupathy Sivakumar et al.

It seems unlikely that a pure end-system implementation of MPTCP would
infringe the claims of this patent application, as they refer only to
a transport-level proxy.  If this patent were asserted against an
MPTCP end-system implementation, the claim construction would have to
be so broad that the mass of MPTCP prior art would be highly likely to
invalidate the patent.  Sivakumar was one of the authors of pTCP, from
2002 or so, that is part of that prior art.  They don't cite pTCP, so
they cannot believe it is directly relevant.

A proxy implementation of MPTCP might infringe though.  If the patent
examiner is smart, he/she will reject the application because a
conventional server load balancer would infringe claim 1 (and probably
many of the other claims), and server load balancers pre-date the
priority date by a lot.  There seems to be plenty of other prior art
too.  For example: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1104348  But
patent examiners don't really have time to search the literature.

- Mark