[ih] Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Karl Auerbach]

Back in the day (whenever that was) the US Patent office only considered 
filed (and perhaps only issued) patents and items published in a small 
set of professional technical journals as representing "prior art".  (I 
don't know whether that self-inflicted blindness still exists, I 
certainly hope it does not.)

As a consequence, the non-official, and particularly the auto-erase 
aspect, of Internet Drafts tended to keep them out of the eyes of US 
patent examiners in their searches for prior art. (It did not seem to 
matter to the USPTO that there are plenty of places to find unofficial 
collections of I-Ds.)

It has long concerned me that this opened the doors to the issuance of 
ill US patents that cover the same grounds as covered in Internet Drafts.

(The increasing tendency of Internet RFCs and Internet standards to be 
purely normative with little to no explanation of the choices made and 
what other choices were examined but not selected has also opened the 
door to bad patents.)

I argued against this IETF practice decades ago, but I was unsuccessful.)

         --karl--

On 2/2/24 9:29 AM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> Over in the IETF we're having a robust debate about changing the way
> Internet Drafts do or do not expire, and in particular whether to let
> them stay active (for some definition of active) for more than six
> months.
>
> RFC 2026 says this:
>
>     An Internet-Draft that is published as an RFC, or that has remained
>     unchanged in the Internet-Drafts directory for more than six months
>     without being recommended by the IESG for publication as an RFC, is
>     simply removed from the Internet-Drafts directory. ...
>
> Does anyone remember where the six months came from?  Was it some principle
> to keep things moving along, or maybe just if we keep them for more than
> six months we'll have to get a bigger disk?
>
> READING COMPREHENSION TEST: We already have plenty of guesses, so we
> don't need any more. I'm asking if anyone was there at the time and
> remembers the actual reason.
>
> R's,
> John