[ih] Saving IETF history

[Karl Auerbach]

One thing about patents and "prior art" is the frequent unwillingness of 
people to look outside of their own disciplines.

Let's look at the notion of the IMP reloading its memory when it forgot.

In our human world one might say "I forget Joe's address, do you 
remember it?"  That's similar to the IMPs request for a software image.  
And the human response, "Oh, it's 123 Imp Lane" is similar to the 
forgetful IMP getting a refresher from a neighbor IMP.

In a patent one might start with a broad claim such as "Refreshing 
memory from neighbor" and then narrow that down with subsequent claims 
such as "Computer refreshing memory from a neighbor computer via a network".

That's perhaps a weak example.   I have long been intrigued by learning 
from biology - plants and animals are amazing robust - to see what we 
can do to improve network reliability and reduce operating costs.  There 
are a lot of lessons - such as aim for survival rather than optimum or 
most efficient use of resources. Another is to layer mechanisms so that 
if one fails there is a backup - this is how trees, for instance, often 
show surprising resilience to new conditions - and could perhaps help us 
harden the Internet's routing systems.

Given a quite synoptic view one could see how a patent on a Covid RNA 
vaccine technique that informs a person's immune systems of 
yet-to-be-experienced viruses could arguably be applied to the sharing 
of Snort intrusion signatures (rules) - both are informing defensive 
systems about ways to identify an attacker.

Everyone here on this list has a deep education that feeds imaginative 
intellects.  I suspect that everyone here has at one time or another had 
an insight that bridged between disciplines.

The Patent Office isn't so smart, informed, or imaginative. While we may 
say "but that's obvious" the patent examiners may be unwilling to 
quickly agree.

It is for that reason that I have been concerned that many of our 
Internet documents have become dry specifications without expressing the 
reasoning and experimentation behind those specifications, or discussing 
the paths not taken (and why.) [Indeed those mentions of the paths not 
taken could sometimes be more important in a patent fight than the 
reasoning that was adopted for a particular Internet technology.]

When fighting patents the goal is often not to fight the patent in its 
entirety but to restrict the scope of the patent to the most narrow of 
its sequence of ever-tightening claims.

         --karl--