Re: SPARC Author Addendum compatibility

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

John C Klensin <john at jck.com> writes:

> (1) Our traditional principle is that the author retains all
> rights but gives the IETF permission to do certain things.  That
> retention of rights applies not just to use of materials the
> author put into the system (I-Ds and, given the text of the Note
> Well, the principles behind which were always the intent,
> mailing list postings, miscellaneous utterings, etc.) but also
> to use of material in the RFCs post-editing and as published.

That isn't clear to me, and seems dubious from a legal point of view.

I have interpreted "author retains all rights" to mean that the author
retains the copyright of the material she contributed.  The author is
never given rights to other material that the author did not contribute,
at least not as far as I can see in RFC 3978.

> (2) There are arguments that are good enough to persuade me that
> we should change that so that the IETF Trust ends up holding the
> copyright in the RFC publication form of the work.  One can get
> from here to there by various paths on which I'm not going to
> comment, but the principle is that the RFCs should belong to the
> IETF [Trust] and not the authors.    YMMD on that principle.

I strongly disagree with this, unless the IETF Trust license all of, and
the entirety of, contributions to everyone under a liberal license.

> 	(i) The WG and IETF advise the IPR Trust to provide such
> 	a license.  This doesn't work because what the IETF
> 	and/or Trust can give, they can take back... if not for
> 	one particular document, then for the next request that
> 	comes along.

I believe that we should address this by stating that the outgoing
license can never be retroactively revoked.  I hope this is the
intention of the WG, but alas, the outgoing documents is underspecified
on this topic.

> (3) I pointed to the SPARC stuff for two reasons.  One was to
> point out that there is some precedent for authors making the
> right things happen by reserving rights or by transferring
> rights on condition of certain licenses being given to the
> authors.  By making handing things over to the contingent on
> such licenses, there is no issue of the IETF somehow deciding
> that author use of published RFCs for their own purposes is a
> revenue opportunity (as many academic publishers have done for
> years).  It was _not_ to suggest that either the specific
> language of the SPARC materials was right for us (our
> terminology differs and that, at least, would need some mapping)
> or that the SPARC-based rights were the precise set that were
> necessary and sufficient for our needs.
>
> The second reason was to point out that there are contributors
> to the IETF and its work who can contribute under the existing
> rules but who would be prohibited by their institutional
> employers from contributing without something equivalent to (or
> a superset of) the SPARC grant-back (or reservation) of rights.
> That condition is very much connected to the SPARC text because
> several institutions have written their rules to cite the SPARC
> ones.   Unless we want to start telling people who have been
> contributing actively to the IETF that they can't do it any
> more, a new model of copyright ownership that would prevent them
> from contributing ought to me, IMO, a complete non-starter.

I don't buy that: the current license proposals aren't that much
different from what is in effect now.  If they have a problem with the
current proposal, I'd expect them to have even more problems with the
current license.

The actual text of the SPARC addendum seems harmful to me, and radically
different from the IETF tradition.  The SPARC addendum gives authors
more limited rights compared to what authors are given by the IETF
today.  The reason for citing SPARC addendum's in organization is
presumably so that authors retain at least the rights guaranteed by the
SPARC addendum.  The IETF's current and proposed rules gives authors
more rights.  I don't understand why they would object to that?  Do
these organization want to release more rights than what they have?
That seems surprising to me.

/Simon

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