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Re: Legal Notice on RFC3161 Uses and their possible infringement against Glassey/Mcneil Patents(et al).


Todd:

I am sorry to see the significant amount of message traffic that your message has generated. I appreciate that you have made the community aware of this potential concern, and I appreciate that you did not ask for a discussion. Unfortunately, a discussion has resulted. I want to remind you and the other PKIX mail list members about the IETF IPR policy.

      The IETF takes no position regarding the validity or scope of any
      Intellectual Property Rights or other rights that might be claimed
      to pertain to the implementation or use of the technology
      described in this document.

Further, I strongly encourage you to update your IPR statement regarding your patent. RFC 3668 provide guidance in this area. Based on my review of the messages posted to the PKIX mailing list as part of this discussion, I believe that you have provided significant details in your follow-on messages that do not appear in your IPR statement.

Remember that individual implementors have to make up their own minds on the applicability of your patent. Any legal proceedings that result from these decisions are not appropriate discussion topics for the PKIX mail list. Similarly, continuation of this discussion is inappropriate. RFC 3161 is finished. The only on-going work by the PKIX working group that I am aware of regarding RFC 3161 is an interoperability report to demonstrate that the document is ready to progress to Draft Standard. I encourage the PKIX mailing list members to focus on this task. Any further discussion of this patent on the PKIX mail list is out of scope.

This thread is now closed.

Russ Housley
Security Area Director



At 01:28 PM 3/25/2004 -0800, todd glassey wrote: 
Lets talk about legal stuff for a minute... and I don't really need anyone
to respond to this unless they want to do so with my lawyers.

---------------------------------------------------

Be advised that I am claiming there is an unauthorized identified use of
RFC3161 that appears to violate parts of the Glassey/McNeil Timestamping
patent ("Controlling Access to Stored Information" - US 6370629 and EP
0997808, et al).  As such, I am formally putting the IETF/IESG on notice
thereof.

Further, these same uses may also violate any number of other "Receipt"
patents issued (including, but not limited to, the original Fisher and Haber
patents; those of others in the Time Management and in the XML
Receipt Business), as well as other patents still in the works.

In light of this notification, please be aware that it is the responsibility
of the developers to do proper diligence prior to releasing commercial or
free services using RFC3161 as its base.

Be advised that we are currently very concerned. If any such RFC3161
application is used for evidentiary purposes or if it is used to enable
control of any access to any data, or data in any record structure,
such use may be in violation of these globally issued patents.

Obviously, in instances where such violation is evident, we will take swift
legal steps to protect our patent(s) while preventing any further
unauthorized use. This would include any violations and damages resulting
from all those responsible, even National Governments using RFC3161 for
commercial and audit purposes (including the EU and its member States).

Please feel free to have the IETF's or IESG's or any other appropriate
attorney (or Developers wishing to avoid the legal complications of an
authorized use) contact me regarding this matter for my point of service so
appropriate licensing can be arranged to protect these patents against such
infringement involving those Developer's Application Systems .

Todd Glassey
Patent Rights Owner and Inventor -US 6370629