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

[John R. Levine]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2024, Karl Auerbach wrote:
> I don't understand your point about attracting patent trolls.

Let's say someone gives us (ISOC, whoever) a patent, and we offer $1 
licenses.  Then someone else shows up and claims our patent is invalid. 
Or per Brian, the way we collected the patents makes us a de facto patent 
pool.  Or whatever.  Even if the suits have little merit, as I'm sure you 
know defending even the crappiest patent suit costs a fortune.  If we 
require people to indemnify us for suits related to their free patents, 
that rather defeats the whole purpose.

If someone wants to provide a free license to a patent relevant to an IETF 
standard, I believe it is adequate to put the license grant in the IPR 
declaration.

> No matter the IETF's policies around standards-making documents there will 
> arise copyrights and patents that someone might wish to transfer to a nice, 
> tax exempt (e.g. section 501), long-lived, institutional owner -

For copyrights, in the US you can abandon copyright basically by saying 
so.  For an excellent example, see https://tomlehrersongs.com/disclaimer/
I realize that in some countries you can't do that, but in practice if 
you've abandoned US copyright that's a pretty strong hint you're not going 
to enforce it anywhere else.

R's,
John