RE: Outgoing section 5.5 and draft-josefsson (Re: San Diego meetingslot)

["David B Harrington" <dbharrington at comcast.net>]

Hi,

I have a real problem with copyrighting and licensing sections of an
IETF standard.

In the same way the author list was abused, I can see copyrighting
sections of an RFC being abused. Corporations would love to embed
licenses in industry standards, and the IETF has opposed that practice
for a long time (it is losing the battle, but we tried).

Imagine when each contributor can claim copyright on "their
contribution" to the document. Does the WG get to rewrite the
copyrighted sample code if it is implemented in a manner that is not
consistent with WG consensus, or is the WG required to keep it intact?
If the document editor rewords contributed copyrighted paragraphs, is
it still copyrighted by the original contributor, or does the editor
get to copyright it, or the WG if it is reworded to meet WG consensus?
Or do we need to keep all the contributions as they were submitted,
and end up with an anthology of copyrighted paragraphs? Will our
documents balloon to twice their current size because of all the
copyrights? Will the documents still be readable?

I think allowing contributors to copyright their contributions is
simply not a useful way to go, even if the contribution is a section
of code.

Viral licenses should be treated the way any other license is treated
by the IETF - the owner of the material can declare the licensing
terms on the IETF's IPR page, and the WG can decide whether to accept
the licensing terms in the draft. 

Then implementers of a commercial product can decide whether to
include the encumbered standard based on the terms and implementers of
open source can decide whether to include the encumbered standard
based on the terms. Debian and others can decide they will not include
commercially-encumbered standards in their products, and commercial
vendors can decide not to include virally-encumbered standards in
their products.

David Harrington
dharrington at huawei.com 
dbharrington at comcast.net
ietfdbh at comcast.net
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harald Alvestrand [mailto:harald at alvestrand.no] 
> Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 5:49 AM
> To: Simon Josefsson
> Cc: Joel M. Halpern; ipr-wg at ietf.org; Steven M. Bellovin
> Subject: Outgoing section 5.5 and draft-josefsson (Re: San 
> Diego meetingslot)
> 
> Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > Section 5.5 of your document seem to discuss this topic, 
> but it does not
> > solve the problem.
> >
> > One problem is that free software licenses are poorly 
> understood by this
> > WG.  In particular, your section 5.3 and 5.5 work against 
> each other.
> >
> > To be applicable for inclusion in a free software product, which
is
> > something your section 5.3 claim is something we want to permit,
the
> > work need to have a clear license.
> >
> > Organizations and companies, such as Debian, review the license
for
> > works that are candidates for being included in their 
> distributions.  If
> > the license is not clear, the work cannot be included.
> >
> > Most, if not all, internationally valid licenses are based 
> on copyright.
> > The licenses typically require that the copyright notice is 
> present and
> > preserved.
> Changing the subject line, since this needs to be discussed 
> on the list 
> (Simon won't be in San Diego, and we need to discuss it on 
> the list anyway).
> 
> I think the thrust of -outgoing is that there needs to be 
> legal language 
> crafted to achieve the desired effect; I think such legal 
> language will 
> have at least 2 components:
> 
> - The actual license from the IETF to whoever uses the documents
> - The way in which other rights are acknowledged or referenced
> 
> The "additional difficulties" that 5.5 refers to are, I think, the 
> difficulty of making sure in a way that is acceptable to IETF 
> participants and users of IETF products that the rights 
> granted through 
> the IETF are in no way limited by the additional notices. (I 
> think the 
> draft needs to be updated to be explicit about what those 
> difficulties 
> are, btw - the people reading it 5 years down the road won't 
> be able to 
> remember this discussion).
> 
> The GPL is a good example, because I think the IETF will have 
> problems 
> claiming that software licensed *only* under the GPL conforms to the

> desire that "anyone can use them" in section 5.3; people who 
> refuse to 
> use code that is under "viral" licensing terms will not be 
> able to use it.
> 
> So something in an RFC that is marked as
> 
>   this code sample copyright (c) Simon. All rights reserved. 
> Available 
> under the GPL
> 
> is not acceptable under 5.3 (I think - more opinions wanted), while
> 
>   this code sample copyright (c) Simon. All rights reserved.
>   Available under the GPL and under the IETF licensing regime 
> defined in 
> RFC XXXX
> 
> would be - once all we're talking about here is finished. Again - I 
> think. Not sure.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
>                      Harald
> 
> 
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> Ipr-wg mailing list
> Ipr-wg at ietf.org
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg
> 



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