Subject: [manet] IPR issue for TBRPF

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 11:43:39 -0700

Hi Fred,

Your draft titled "An outsider's view of MANET" 
<draft-baker-manet-review-01>, contains the following paragraph:

  TBRPF is interesting, and should work correctly, although the
  operational utility of some of its optimizations may be open to
  question in a given network.  SRI has aggressively marketed TBRPF and
  its IPRs to the working group.  The fact that a patent has been
  applied for on certain aspects is, however, severely limiting
  politically.  If there is any way in which the IETF is absolutely
  predictable, it is that when confronted with a choice between a
  proposal encumbered with IPR issues and an unencumbered proposal, it
  will choose the unencumbered one.

Your statement "SRI has aggressively marketed TBRPF and its IPRs
to the working group" seems to imply that SRI wants to retain
IP rights even if TBRPF becomes an IETF standard. 
That is not true.  As per our Patent Rights Statement in the
TBRPF draft, we will relinquish all patent rights if TBRPF
becomes a standard. In addition, anyone may implement TBRPF,
or use our software, for purposes related to IETF standardization.
(This is true even if TBRPF is placed on "experimental track"
for an arbitrarily long period of time.)

The purpose of SRI's patent application is to retain IP rights if 
TBRPF does NOT become a standard.  Why should SRI give up its rights 
to TBRPF if it is not accepted by the IETF, but nonetheless is
useful in some situations and a valuable asset to the company? 

Does your statement "when confronted with a choice between a proposal 
encumbered with IPR issues and an unencumbered proposal, it will choose 
the unencumbered one", still apply when all IP rights are to be 
relinquished upon standardization?  If so, can you give me an example?

Under these conditions, I would not say we have "agressively marketed"
TBPRF, but we have agressively demonstrated the benefits of TBRPF versus 
other protocols, as part of our obligations to our government clients, 
who requested that we work toward the standardization of a higher 
performance protocol for military networks.

Richard

-----------------------
Richard Ogier
Sr. Research Engineer
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Ave.
Menlo Park, CA 94025
Tel: 650-859-4216
Fax: 650-859-4812
Email: [email-masked]
TBRPF web site: http://www.erg.sri.com/projects/tbrpf/
------------------------

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