...
The notion is not right, albeit that it is reflected in the current IETF IPR
policy, that a process can be in any way restricted from being improved
because someone planted a copyright notice on its essential description. An
description of a process, method of operation, etc., cannot be locked away
and prevented from amendment and improvement because of copyright. Allowing
that would subject our functional process specifications in IETF to 100-year
copyright monopolies even though there aren't even 20-year patent monopolies
that apply to that specification. Nobody owns those ideas or the essential
descriptions of those ideas; they are public domain.
So my answer to Sam's question is: I dare anyone to try and stop you or me
from taking an IETF RFC and revising it as necessary to express any new
idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle,
or discovery. And I dare anyone to try and stop IETF or any other standards
organization from adopting such an improvement as a revised RFC because of a
copyright notice.
...
