[ih] patent licenses, not Why the six month draft expiration ?

[Jack Haverty]

About 12 years ago I was involved as an expert witness in a patent fight 
that had been going on literally for 20+ years.  The Patent Office had 
issued the patent and it had been invalidated and revalidated several 
times as the lawyers battled over the decades.

That was when the US system was "First To Invent", and prior art played 
a large role in challenging the validity of patents.  We use the Arpanet 
IMP as an example of prior art to invalidate the patent (actually just 
one of many claims).  The issue of whether or not the patent was 
actually valid (even though it had alrready expired after 17 years) was 
never resolved, because the litigants settled out of court.

At the time, I heard lots of discussions in the lawyer world about the 
apparent upcoming switch to "First To File" structure, and the 
impression I got was that the new structure would take away a lot of the 
complexity of finding prior art and litigating a patent's validity for 
20+ years.  Prior art wouldn't matter.   The first patent filed would 
rule, and couldn't be invalidated by presenting some previously unknown 
(to the Examiners)  prior art.

I'm not in that world now, so I don't know how things actually changed 
after the 2013 switch to "First To File".  It seemed that such a change 
would make filing a patent much more important to establish ownership of 
some innovation.   It wouldn't help to search and find someone who had 
done it before, but failed to file a patent.  Whoever filed first 
legally owned the technology.

My impression of how the IETF operates now is that it creates technology 
(protocols, algorithms, etc) and puts them "on the shelf" for anyone to 
use.  But does the IETF (or anyone else) protect such innovations by 
filing a patent?

What's to prevent some patent troll now from taking whatever IETF puts 
"on the shelf" and filing a patent application for it?

Jack Haverty



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