Fwd: Connection splitting patent relevant to PILC community

Dear IETF Secretariat,

Aaron Falk and I are co-chairs of the PILC working group. We
were notified this week by Emmanuel Duros of a notice claiming
patent infringement that Emmanuel passed along to us. Scott
Bradner says we are encouraged (not required) to notify the IETF
of this claim, so, here's what we know, so far.

Title: "Data transmission on client-server system using TCP/IP"
No. Publication: DE19910023
Date of publication: 2000-09-14
Date of recording/priority: 1999-03-08
Inventors: Kellerer Wolfgang, Zurek-Terhardt Guenther, Sties 
  Peter
Company: Rodhe and Schwarz
Patent granted in: Germany

Brief summary: This patent covers the "dividing" of one
connection into two connections to accommodate a low bandwidth
path.

PILC produced BCP and Informational specifications, including
RFC 3135 "Performance Enhancing Proxies Intended to Mitigate
Link-Related Degradations" (J. Border, M. Kojo, J. Griner, G.
Montenegro, Z. Shelby, June 2001, Informational,
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3135.txt).

RFC 3135 describes "split connections" in section 2.4, and
discusses implications of PEP use, including connection
splitting, in section 4.1. Although it's an Informational RFC,
not a standards-track document, there's apparently some overlap
between what's being described in the RFC and what's claimed by
the patent holders.

Emmanuel's contact information is included as an attachment. He
has indicated a willingness to provide scans (in German) and
translations (to English) to the IESG Secretariat, if this is
helpful to the IETF community.

We have copied the PILC mailing list on this e-mail for their
information (but not for their discussion of patent validity on
the mailing list!).

Spencer, for Spencer and Aaron

--- Emmanuel Duros <[email protected]> wrote:
> Subject: Connection splitting patent ??
> From: Emmanuel Duros <[email protected]>
> To: [email protected], [email protected],
> [email protected]
> Date: 31 Mar 2003 11:38:11 +0200
> 
> Dear All,
> 
> A few days ago my company received a patent infrigement from a
> german
> company called Rodhe & Schwarz.
> 
> This company claims to have a patent for what we call at IETF
> "connection splitting". 
> 
> The patent describes an architecture with a link that has some
> specific
> characteristics such as a satellite link. This link is then
> surrounded
> by 2 equipements that split, for obvious reasons, in 3
> connections an
> end-to-end TCP connections... 

[ deleted down to ]

> Emmanuel
> -- 
> Emmanuel Duros                  http://www.udcast.com
> 2455 Route des Dolines BP355  | Tel : +33 (0)4 93 00 16 60
> 06906 Sophia Antipolis France | Fax : +33 (0)4 93 00 16 61
>             ** Full IP over Broadcast Media **

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