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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) M. Yevstifeyev Request for Comments: 6579 March 2012 Category: Informational ISSN: 2070-1721

                The 'disclosure' Link Relation Type

Abstract

 This document specifies the 'disclosure' link relation type.  It
 designates a list of IPR disclosures made with respect to the
 material for which such a relation type is specified.

Status of This Memo

 This document is not an Internet Standards Track specification; it is
 published for informational purposes.

 This document is a product of the Internet Engineering Task Force
 (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
 http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc6579.

Copyright Notice

 Copyright (c) 2012 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the
 document authors.  All rights reserved.

 This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal
 Provisions Relating to IETF Documents
 (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) 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.

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Table of Contents

 1. Introduction  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
   1.1. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  2
 2. 'disclosure' Link Relation Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
   2.1. Examples  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
 3. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  3
 4. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
 5. Normative References  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
 Appendix A. Acknowledgments  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  5

1. Introduction

 RFC 5988 [RFC5988] defined a way of indicating relationships between
 resources on the Web.  This document specifies the 'disclosure' link
 relation type.  It designates a list of IPR disclosures made with
 respect to the material for which such a relation type is specified.
 Please note that the term "patent disclosure" should be considered
 synonymous with "IPR disclosure" for the purposes of 'disclosure'
 link relation type semantics, as patent disclosures are a subset of
 IPR disclosures.

 The W3C already mandates the use of the 'disclosure' link relation
 type for links to patent disclosures in all its documents.  However,
 it has long been used with no proper specification and registration.
 This document is to fill this gap and encourage wider use of the
 'disclosure' relation type.  It formally specifies the existing
 practice of use of the link relation type and registers it in the
 registry created by RFC 5988.

 Please note that the 'disclosure' relation type designates a
 different resource than the 'copyright' type does; the latter refers
 to the copyright statement while the former is used to reference a
 list of patent disclosures.  Please see RFC 5988 [RFC5988] for more
 information on the 'copyright' relation type.

1.1. Terminology

 The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
 "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
 document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC2119].

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2. 'disclosure' Link Relation Type

 Whenever the 'disclosure' relation type is used, the resource at the
 target Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) [RFC5988] MUST
 represent a list of patent disclosures made with respect to the
 material referenced by context IRI.  This also covers the case of an
 empty list and a list containing one entry.

2.1. Examples

 This section provides an example of possible use of the 'disclosure'
 relation type.

 If the page <http://example.org/ipr/meta-spec/> contains a list of
 patent disclosures made with respect to the specification found at
 <http://example.org/specs/meta-spec/spec.html>, the latter would have
 the following fragment of HTML source code:

 <html>
   ...
   Please visit
   <a rel="disclosure" href="http://example.org/ipr/meta-spec/">
   the IPR page</a> for the list of patent disclosures made with
   respect to this specification.
   ...
 </html>

 In the case of Link header field, the HTTP response would contain the
 following header field:

    Link: <http://example.org/ipr/meta-spec/>; rel="disclosure";
          title="Patent Disclosures List"

 (Please note that the actual header field will not contain the line
 break and spaces after the 'rel' parameter.)

3. Security Considerations

 The 'disclosure' relation type is truly believed not to raise any new
 security issues that are not discussed in RFC 5988 for generic use of
 the Web linking mechanism.

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4. IANA Considerations

 IANA has registered the 'disclosure' link relation type in the "Link
 Relations" registry, with a reference to this document, using the
 following template:

 o  Relation name: disclosure

 o  Description: Refers to a list of patent disclosures made with
    respect to material for which 'disclosure' relation is specified.

 o Reference: RFC 6579

5. Normative References

 [RFC2119]  Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
            Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.

 [RFC5988]  Nottingham, M., "Web Linking", RFC 5988, October 2010.

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Appendix A. Acknowledgments

 Thanks to Bjoern Hoehrmann for noticing that the 'disclosure'
 relation is not properly specified and, correspondingly, initiating
 this work.  The author would also like to acknowledge the
 contributions of (in alphabetical order) Bjoern Hoehrmann, John
 Klensin, Subramanian Moonesamy, Julian Reschke, Thomas Roessler,
 Peter Saint-Andre, Martin Thomson, and Juergen Quittek to this
 document.

Author's Address

 Mykyta Yevstifeyev
 8 Kuzovkov St., Apt. 25
 Kotovsk
 Ukraine

 EMail: evnikita2@gmail.com

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