ProCom Ad Hoc on Antitrust - review of antitrust guidelines

[David_Law@xxxxxxxx]

All,

This is an update on the activities of the ProCom ad hoc on anti-trust as 
well as an invitation to review and comment on the draft anti-trust 
guidelines. As you may remember this ad hoc was chartered by ProCom at 
it's September meeting and it's formation was announced during the ProCom 
report at the IEEE-SA Standards Board meeting on Friday 15th September 
2006. I was appointed to chair the ad hoc and the following individuals 
volunteered to participate: Chuck Adams, Jim Hughes, Rich Hulett, Michael 
Lindsay, Amy Marasco, Ron Moore, Chuck Powers, Robert Skitol, from staff 
Karen Kenney, Mary Lynn Nielsen, Dave Ringle.

The ad hoc was chartered with drafting proposed wording for the IEEE-SA 
Operations Manual to:

1) Modify the language in 5.3.8 to bring it into alignment with current 
anti-trust enforcement practices.
2) Align 5.3.8 with the proposed changes to the Patent Policy which 
explicitly allows the distribution of accepted LOAs at WG meetings.

This was completed at the December Standards Board meeting when the new 
language for subclause 5.3.8 was adopted (Note - due to changes to the 
IEEE-SA Standards Board Operation manual published in January subclause 
5.3.8 is now subclause 5.3.10).

The ad hoc was also chartered to:

3) Consider developing more extensive anti-trust compliance education 
language for potential inclusion in the Standards Companion or elsewhere.
4) Pointing to this education language in 5.3.8.

At the December ProCom meeting it was agreed that more extensive 
anti-trust guidelines are required to support the changes to the IEEE-SA 
Standards Board Operations manual. Since then the ad hoc has been working 
on developing these guidelines. The ad hoc has come to consensus on a 
draft of the antitrust guidelines and would like to offer you the 
opportunity to comment on the draft. My thanks to the members of the Ad 
Hoc for all the work they have put in developing these draft guidelines. 

Since these guidelines will cover all standards development activities I 
was asked to request review from the PP_DILAOG reflector as well a the 
IEEE-SA Standard Board, and it's committees, members. My apologies to 
those that will receive multiple copies of this email due to that.

All comments concerning the attached draft must be entered using the 
PatCom Commenting Tool [ 
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/pp-dialog/comment-tool/index.html ] - 
please select 'Guidelines' as the document type when entering your 
comments. These comments will then be reviewed by the ad hoc, responded 
to, and updates made to the draft as required. The comments, responses and 
the resultant draft will then be considered at the ProCom Meeting held on 
Tuesday March 20th. The deadline for submission of comments is 11:59PM AOE 
Wednesday February 21st, 2007. Please email the output from your 
commenting tool to me at David_Law@3com.com. 

As always if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards,
  David Law

ProCom_Antitrust_Guide_V1p0.pdf