Re: Section 6.5: Additional Licenses for IETF Contributions

[John C Klensin <john-ietf at jck.com>]

--On Thursday, May 03, 2007 1:44 PM +0200 Simon Josefsson 
<simon at josefsson.org> wrote:

> 6.5.  Additional Licenses for IETF Contributions
>
>    There have been contexts where the material in an IETF
> contribution    is also available under other license terms.
> The IETF wishes to be    able to include content which is
> available under such licenses.  It    is desirable to indicate
> in the IETF contribution that other licenses    are available.
> It would be inappropriate and confusing if such    additional
> licenses restricted the rights the IETF intends to grant    in
> the content of RFCS.
>
> The first sentence strikes me as confusing when reading the
> second sentence.  In the second sentence, the material is
> already included in the IETF contribution, therefor a "wish to
> be able to include it" seems confusing.  Why wish to include
> something that is already included?

I agree with Simon that this is confusing.

Let me take a shot at guessing what the intent might be.

Suppose I submit something as an IETF Contribution.   Suppose I 
have granted, or am willing to grant, licenses to others under 
other circumstances.  I think what is being said here is that 
the IETF understands that it is in everyone's interest to make 
the information about those other licenses, or about how the 
information may be obtained, available.

Is it possible that we can sweep away the circumlocutions by 
simply saying something like, probably after the "authors retain 
all rights" statement:

   In addition to the license granted to the IETF, contributors
   how have made other licensing arrangements may document
   those arrangements as part of the contribution, using
   mechanisms that may be specified from time to time by the
   IETF Trust.  The absence of documentation of additional
   licenses should not be taken to indicate that those licenses
   are not available; instead, the author should be contacted
   for information as needed.

Note the desire to avoid getting hung up in boilerplate here. 
Then, if I were the Trust, I'd construct, in consultation with 
Counsel, one sentence that said something like "Additional 
licenses may be available from the author for some or all of 
this material, see <link>", where <link> is supplied by the 
author.

When that link is essentially a pointer to some well-known 
literary work, I'd expect to see something like "The material in 
this Contribution is also available under the Tie Your Hands and 
Feet Together (TYHAF) license whose text is available at <link>. 
Where it is more individualized and the author does not have a 
convenient mechanism for available for providing a stable link, 
I think the IETF should provide for posting such license 
materials on the same basis that we provide for posting IPR 
disclosures of other varieties.

Does that disentangle things?

Or, if I've missed the intent of the that section, could someone 
please explain it in plain English (rather than pseudo-lawyer)?

     john


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