Cisco's Statement about IPR Claimed in draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure

Tue May 11 23:58:39 UTC 2004

What's very amusing is reading section 5 of the draft, wherein the 
author
distributes credit to a number of parties.  If Cisco were to file a 
patent
at this point and not include those parties (including other companies),
the patent validity would be at risk by reason of excluding a 
contributor.
If Cisco does include all of those other companies in the patent, then 
all of
them must also present the IETF with relevant IPR statements.

Frankly, this is yet another PR blunder by Cisco.  If they had simply 
said
nothing or formally put their contribution into the public domain, they 
wouldn't
look so egregiously greedy.

Tony

On May 11, 2004, at 3:46 PM, David Krause wrote:

>
> Looks like Cisco is now trying to patent security....
>
> http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/cisco-ipr-draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure.txt
>
> Title: Cisco's Statement about IPR Claimed in draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure
> Received: April 26, 2004
> From: Robert Barr <rbarr at cisco.com>
>
> Cisco is the owner of one or more pending patent applications relating 
> to
> the subject matter of "Transmission Control Protocol security
> considerations" <draft-ietf-tcpm-tcpsecure-00.txt>. If technology in 
> this
> document is included in a standard adopted by IETF and any claims of 
> any
> Cisco patents are necessary for practicing the standard, any party 
> will be
> able to obtain a license from Cisco to use any such patent claims under
> reasonable, non-discriminatory terms, with reciprocity, to implement 
> and
> fully comply with the standard.
>
> For information contact:
>
> Robert Barr
> Worldwide Patent Counsel
> Cisco Systems
> 408-525-9706
>
> rbarr at cisco.com
>