Results from the drafting committee
The PatCom drafting committee consisting on myself, David Law, Claire Topp (Counsel) and Michael Lindsay (Counsel) spend two full days in early May going through the Bylaws, Ops Man and the LOA form developing language to implement the motions approved at the last PatCom meeting. Additionally and in support of those motions, we created a "definition of terms" document which is expected to be incorporated into the Bylaws. Subsequently, these documents were delivered to the "Extended Drafting Committee" consisting of:
- Chuck Adams (IBM & PatCom member)
- Jeff Fromm (HP)
- Susan Hoyler (Qualcomm)
- Gil Ohana (Cisco)
- Mike Sirtori (Intel)
- Amy Marasco (Microsoft)
- Geoff Thompson (IEEE SA Member)
After receipt of their comments, David, Claire, Michael and I spent approximately ten hours on teleconferences reviewing these comments. At this point in time, we have completed comment disposition on the Bylaws, Ops Man, and the set of defined terms. We still have approximately 75 comments on the LOA form to consider.
Given that the Bylaws and Ops Man are the basis upon which any LOA form will be developed, I thought it would be appropriate to distribute those documents while we continue to work on the LOA form.
You should note, that while we were working on this document, we tried to address issues that had been raised multiple times in the normal course of the operation of PatCom. For example, we have had multiple questions about "This assurance shall be provided without coercion." To whom does the "without coercion" apply? We changed that sentence to read " The IEEE shall request this assurance without coercion" which is much clearer and consistent with the intent of the ANSI Essential Requirements.
The original output from the drafting committee as well as the revised output after considering all the comments is now available on the PP-DIALOG web site. Go to http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/pp-dialog and click on "Drafting Committee" to obtain the documents. A PDF of the comments from the Extended Draft Committee and their dispositions have also been posted with the revised documents.
Considering the enormous amount of work David Law (thank you David!!) did to manually enter all the comments from the Extended Drafting Committee into a database, the drafting committee has decided to only accept future comments through a comment entry tool adapted from 802.3 (thanks to Geoff Thompson). A link to the comment entry tool is on the "Drafting Committee" page. A PDF of the comments from the Extended Draft Committee and their dispositions have also been posted.
Please review these documents in detail; they will be discussed at the June 5th PatCom meeting. The drafting committee believes these contain significant improvements to our Patent Policy and that they should be approved by PatCom.
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Don Wright don@lexmark.com
f.wright@ieee.org / f.wright@computer.org
Director of Standards
Lexmark International INCITS Executive Board Vice-Chair
C14/082-3 IEEE SA Standards Board Past Chair
740 New Circle Rd IEEE SASB Patent Committee Chair
Lexington, Ky 40550 Member: IEEE SA Board of Governors
859-825-4808 (phone) Member: IEEE CS SAB & W3C AC
603-963-8352 (fax) Director, IEEE-ISTO
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