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Thanks Dave. I wanted to comment on agenda Item 5.2, and to propose a new agenda item 5.3. First, agenda item 5.2:
It seems to me that participants in IEEE-SA working groups benefit from more and better information about potential patent licensing issues, just as they benefit from more and better information
about the technical merits of contributions made by other participants. To that end, if a contribution is made and the submitter of the contribution has not agreed to be bound by the updated IEEE-SA patent policy, that fact
must be made known to participants in the working group. The participants, and the companies they work for,
must be in a position to assess potential patent licensing issues including a contribution in a proposed standard may expose them to, just as they assess the contribution’s technical merits. So, I propose rewriting the text for discussion under agenda
item 5.2 as follows: “If an Accepted LOA pre-dates the current version of the patent policy text, a Working Group chair or Sponsor chair
New text Turning to new agenda item 5.3:
As I have said before, to address continuing uncertainty in the 802.11 working group in particular, IEEE-SA leadership needs to take a position regarding the effectiveness of the updated
patent policy text to PARs approved on or after March 15, 2015. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss this issue when we met in Piscataway in December. At that time I made the proposal summarized below:
·
The updated patent policy text applies to any patent essential to implement any standard resulting from a PAR approved on or after March 15, 2015;
However,
·
If a patent covered by an LOA submitted before March 15, 2015 was essential to a standard resulting from a PAR approved before March 15, 2015 and, applying SASB Operations Manual
Section 6.3.5, that patent would be subject to a continuing obligation to license under the previously-submitted LOA because the patent is essential to an amendment, corrigenda, edition, or revision initiated as a result of a PAR approved on or after March
15, 2015, then the licensing of the patent would continue to be governed by the patent policy text in the form it existed when the LOA was first submitted. Following the discussion of my proposal, the PatCom chair for 2016, mindful of the change in membership of PatCom effective on January 1, 2017, encouraged the 2017 membership of PatCom to
discuss the question of the application of the updated patent policy text to new work. I would be interested to learn during the meeting in Shenzhen whether that discussion has happened, and with what result. I therefore ask that a new agenda item, 5.3,
be added so that we can learn how the Patent Committee’s thinking on this important, but still unsettled, issue has progressed. I look forward to our meeting. Best regards, Gil Ohana (employed by and affiliated with Cisco Systems, Inc.) From: Dave Ringle [mailto:d.ringle@xxxxxxxx]
The 21 March 2017 PatCom meeting agenda is located at http://standards.ieee.org/about/sasb/patcom/agenda.pdf ****************************************************************** |