Subject: Re: [smime] IPR Disclosure Certicom Corp.'s Statement about IPR related to RFC 2631

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2015 13:25:45 +0000

IETF Secretariat <[email-masked]> writes:

>An IPR disclosure that pertains to your RFC entitled "Diffie-Hellman Key
>Agreement Method" (RFC2631) was submitted to the IETF Secretariat on  and has
>been posted on the "IETF Page of Intellectual Property Rights Disclosures" (
>https://datatracker.ietf.org/ipr/2579/). The title of the IPR disclosure is
>"Certicom Corp.'s Statement about IPR related to RFC 2631"

That must be one helluva submarine patent if it applies to an RFC published
sixteen years ago.

(It seems pretty bizarre for this to pop up now anyway, firstly because it's
for X9.42 in S/MIME which was pretty much universally ignored by everyone, and
secondly because the filing date for US 6563928, "Apr 1, 1999" postdates
X9.42, which 2631 is based on, by quite some time).

Peter.

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2015 10:34:18 -0400

> X9.42, which 2631 is based on, by quite some time).

One of the patents has a priority date prior to the move to 20 years
from issue. So it has about a year left to run.

There is often an uptick in litigation just before expiry. This is
probably a sign that someone is going through making sure all the
boxes are ticked. But I fail to see how a disclosure made 15 years
late helps matters any.