None of us on the TLS mailing list is a lawyer, definitely not a patent lawyer, and even if we were, the discussion about whether or not a patent applies will usually never terminate. The only way to really know is to implement, wait for the lawsuit, and see who wins. Unfortunately, most implementers, especially commercial ones are not willing to take this route.
Looking for unencumbered alternatives is even more tricky. We know (or think) that TLS-SRP is encumbered. Suppose we took these guys' proposal to create an unencumbered alternative:
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2008/05/29/j-pake/They claim that JPAKE is unencumbered, so TLS-JPAKE should be unencumbered, no? Well, we don't really know - it's hard to prove a negative. If we go ahead and specify and implement TLS-JPAKE, somebody might come out of the woodwork and claim we are infringing. All the discussion on the TLS or IESG mailing lists is not going to change that.
On Jul 1, 2008, at 2:03 AM, Richard M Stallman wrote:
Discussing IPR issues burns a whole lot of resources in a useless fashion.Since "IPR" refers to a congeries of different laws, any general statement about "IPR issues" is almost always an overgeneralization. Your statement is one. Copyright issues and trademark issues generally do NOT cause serious problems for a proposed technique, because it is easy enough to work around them. To discuss them here at length would probably be superfluous. By contrast, patent problems are often fatal, and there is no remedy except to wait as much as 20 years. Thus, discussing whether a proposed technique is patented is absolutely crucial. Lumping together things which are so different in their effects is encouraging confusion. Thus, using the term "IPR" does only harm. Avoiding it is easy, so let's avoid it. When referring to patent issues, let's call them "patent issues". _______________________________________________ TLS mailing list TLS@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/tls Scanned by Check Point Total Security Gateway.
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