Re: SPARC Author Addendum compatibility

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

--On Saturday, 28 July, 2007 17:22 +0200 Simon Josefsson
<simon at josefsson.org> wrote:

> 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.

Simon, there is a very clear tradition about how RFCs, and RFC
Contributions, were handled over time, starting long before
there was an IETF.  When I talk about "traditional principles",
I am talking about that tradition.   One of the properties of
that tradition was that the IETF was permitted to use documents
in any way it needed within the standards process, that anyone
was able to reproduce, distribute, or translate RFCs in toto.
In principle, any other uses by anyone else that required
permission necessitated the would-be user to work that out with
the author(s).   One can either like that or not, consider it
practical and/or legally reasonable or not, but I believe it is
a correct characterization of the long-term principles and
assumptions. 

It is also clear that the IETF has been moving away from that
model  in its published statements and boilerplate.  Some of
those moves, such as more flexibility for the use of "code",
have obviously been necessary and the changes clearly represent
community consensus -- at least of the IETF community if not of
the RFC-user community.  Others have been consequences of a
gradual shift in the perceived role of the IETF from a body that
does engineering work that promotes Internet interoperability to
a standards body with an interest in controlling and promoting
the use of its products.  And still others have been accidents
of how particular documents were worded -- sometimes nibbling
away at rights in sufficiently small units that no one has felt
motivated to object loudly.

Because "the IETF Trust is the sole owner of the copyright in a
complete RFC" is a major step --both from the original principle
and from where I believe we stand today-- I don't want to see it
slip through without community discussion.  That does not
indicate that I think it is a bad idea because I don't; I just
believe that we need to identify consequences we might not like
and deal with them.

> 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.

Clearly you are not the only one who interpreted things that
way.  It is not the original interpretation.  And, as you can
probably infer from the above, I don't really care what 3978
says or appears to say: if we were convinced that it was
adequate, this WG would have been closed long ago.

>> (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.

Of course, such a license would be a superset of the SPARC one.
I imagine that we can argue its merits (or not) elsewhere.  But
note that, if you believe that authors have no rights in an RFC
other than to the text of their original contributions, this
shift in copyright status --based on the work of the RFC Editor
and the compilation associated with adding boilerplate that
clearly belongs to the IETF-- changes almost nothing.

>> 	(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.

Preventing revocation of the outgoing license is no protection
against future changes for future outgoing licenses.  And I note
that there is a window between submission of incoming materials
and  issuance of outgoing ones (with whatever license they
carry).  Submitting something with an inbound license that gives
the IETF very broad authority on the assumption that the
outbound license in effect when the document is published is
probably safe in all foreseeable circumstances, but is just not
legally sensible.

>...
>> 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.

That is not the interpretation of some of the people involved.
In particular, there is almost nothing in the existing
procedures, and nothing at all in the model contemplated by
"outgoing" that would legally prevent the IETF Trust from
charging an author a small fee for including an RFC on the
author's web site or a fee for making a large, non-code, excerpt.

> 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.
>...

That is not clear.  See out difference of opinion about the
rights authors now have to the published form of RFCs above.
And, again, I'm not concerned about the rules we intend to have,
or the rules that we _suggest_ to the IETF Trust that they
adopt, but in limiting the ability of the Trust to adopt
author-hostile rules.   While I'm not worried about the ethics
of the individuals involved today, I also note that, if there is
ever a conflict between the needs and desires of the IETF, and
suggestions from the IETF to the Trust reflecting those needs
and desires, and the needs or desires of the Trust and/or IASA,
having the same person or firm as counsel for both could
constitute a conflict of interest.

And, again, I cited SPARC as a minimum if the IETF is going to
strongly assert copyright over the RFCs.   If the IETF is not
going to do that, then we are left with the current ambiguous
situation with which, I, at least, can life.  If we are going to
do that, then I think there needs to be clear grants back to
authors that are at least as strong as SPARC.  As someone who is
still attached to the original principles and intent, I have no
objections at all to making them a lot stronger.

    john


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