[cabfpub] Minutes for future working group meetings

[Gervase Markham]

On 13/11/16 23:24, Kirk Hall via Public wrote:
> The recent discussions of our Bylaws and IPR Policy point out the need
> for Minutes of working group meetings.  I have a suggestion at the _end_
> of this message on how we should do this in the future.  Here are the
> relevant Bylaws and IPR Policy provisions.

So if Participant Foo says something, and something on that topic later
ends up in a CAB Forum Guideline, and they try and exclude some IPR, and
other people say "hey, that was your submitted idea", eventually, one
way or another, it'll be a judge that decides whether the exclusion is
valid, by ruling on whether the patented idea was part of a Contribution
from Participant Foo.

At the moment, the judge will decide that based on the minutes, because
that's how we define what a Contribution is.

If we are going to retain recordings, would it make sense to instead
allow Contributions to be determined based on those?

In that case, what would happen is that both sides in the suit would get
various parts of the recordings transcripted, and the judge would decide
based on those instead. Still documentation, but different documentation.

The advantage of this is that it doesn't put all the pressure on the
person making the minutes to make them super-accurate, and it leads to a
more accurate and fair result because the judgement is made based on
what was actually said, rather than a summary of what was said which may
be more or less accurate, and whose completeness cannot be easily judged
at the time.

Gerv