[cabfpub] Minutes for future working group meetings

[Kirk Hall]

Gerv - I like your idea of allowing the term "Contributions" as used in the CA/Browser Forum's IPR Policy to rely on recordings of statements made by members at meetings and on teleconferences along with written Minutes -- that could solve a lot of record-keeping problems for us all.  

Summary written Minutes of people who participated and the  main issues discussed, plus conclusions and next steps, would still be useful, but that type of Minutes would be pretty easy to write - we might even get volunteers to write them.  And such written Minutes would be a useful guide as to which recordings a PAG would want to listen to in order to determine whether or not a member is allowed to claim an IP Exclusion Notice for a particular Guideline.

Can you suggest this at the new IPR Policy Task Force meetings, as a potential amendment to our current IPR Policy?  We would definitely support that.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gervase Markham [mailto:gerv at mozilla.org] 
Sent: Monday, November 14, 2016 8:09 AM
To: CA/Browser Forum Public Discussion List <public at cabforum.org>
Cc: Kirk Hall <Kirk.Hall at entrustdatacard.com>
Subject: Re: [cabfpub] Minutes for future working group meetings

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