RE: Motion to abandon Sender ID

["Harry Katz" <hkatz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, September 01, 2004 5:18 PM, mazieres@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> On Wed, 01 Sep 2004 19:28:32 -0400, Yakov Shafranovich 
> <research@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > A few comments. First of all, we do not know whether the IPR claims 
> > extend to SPF classic or not.
> 
> You are correct that we don't know whether SPF or SPF2 is 
> covered by pending patent claims from Microsoft.  However, we 
> *do* know that any such claims are *not* covered by 
> Microsoft's license agreement.  Thus, even if we were to 
> adopt Sender ID as the standard, should Microsoft 
> subsequently be granted a patent covering the SPF2 record 
> format, it would no longer be possible to deploy Sender ID 
> without a new license from Microsoft.
> 
> If, at this point, sender ID were derailed by a patent from 
> Microsoft over SPF, I think this would pretty clearly 
> demonstrate bad faith on Microsoft's part.  Since we have 
> been instructed to assume good faith on the part of all 
> parties, I think this means operating under the assumption that:
> 
> 1) The pending patent rights granted by Microsoft's Sender ID 
> agreement are sufficient to deploy Sender ID (at least for 
> the subset of software authors who find the conditions of the 
> agreement acceptable), and therefore
> 
> 2) Microsoft does not have any pending claims over the SPF 
> record format.
> 
> So yes, anybody, even Microsoft, might have patent claims 
> that might prohibit just about any recommendation of the 
> MARID working group. 
> But we still have to make progress, and the best we can do is 
> deal with the most likely scenario, which is that Microsoft 
> probably has applied for patents, that the patents probably 
> cover the portions of Sender ID they have offered to 
> license--namely the pra and or core documents--and finally 
> that until we have more information, none of the MARID 
> proposals is any more or less likely to be affected by 
> third-party patent holders.

Our IPR disclosure filed with the IETF and available at
http://www.ietf.org/ietf/IPR/microsoft-ipr-draft-ietf-marid-core.txt is
quite specific and covers the marid-core and marid-pra specs used in
combination.  That's all.  We do not, to the best of my knowledge, have
any IPR claims related to either marid-protocol, which describes the
SPF2 record format, or marid-submitter.