You can improve any technology you want, modulo IPR -- that's not
the
point here. The problem is taking existing copyrighted text and
using
it as a base for describing your technology.
That's indeed the problem we stumbled upon years ago. Suppose that a
contributor has written a complete description of technology X,
getting it
published as a 100 pages RFC. A remarkable feat, and a great
contribution to
the community. A few years letter, the working group realizes that
they like
the technology, but would like to change a couple options. That
normally
translates into changing a paragraph or two, resulting in a new
RFC, more
than 90% identical to the previous one.
Suppose now that for whatever reasons, the original author
disagrees with
the changes, or with the new management of the working group, or
with the
new editor. People are human, these things do happen. IANAL, but my
understanding at the time was that the original copyright still
applied to
the original text, and that the working group would be left with
only bad
options. They could issue a delta RFC that only contained the
modifications,
but that is somewhat confusing for the readers. Or they could
undertake a
complete rewriting of the standard, but that takes a long time and
is also
prone to errors and confusion.
This is very much why we got the statement on copyrights in RFC
1602, in
1996. You will notice that copyrights were only mentioned as
something we
might need to worry about later in the appendix of the previous
rules, RFC
1310 published in 1992.
-- Christian Huitema
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