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@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@cisco.com