Re: IPR Questions Raised by Sam Hartman at the IETF 73 Plenary

[John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>]

>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.

You are probably right that the combination of the broad formal and
informal license that people have given for RFCs and the thin
copyright protection on descriptive technical documents would mean
that even if a disgruntled author of an old RFC sued to prevent his
words from being adapted in a new RFC, he'd eventually lose.

But I sure don't want to pay for the lawsuit to find out.

The only way I can currently see out of this mess is for the IETF or
the IETF Trust to take it upon itself to get new licenses from as many
old authors or their heirs as it can.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor
"More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf at ietf.org
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf