Sanctions Available for Application to Violators of IETF IPR Policy

The IETF has developed and documented policies that govern the behavior of all IETF participants with respect to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) about which they might reasonably be aware. The IETF takes conformance to these IPR policies very seriously. However, there has been some ambiguity as to what the appropriate sanctions are for the violation of these policies, and how and by whom those sanctions are to be applied. This document discusses these issues and provides a suite of potential actions that can be taken within the IETF community in cases related to patents. (IETF). It represents the consensus of the IETF community. It has received public review and has been approved for publication by the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG). Not all documents approved by the IESG are a candidate for any level of Internet Standard; see Section 2 of RFC 5741. Information about the current status of this document, any errata, and how to provide feedback on it may be obtained at in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.