-Incoming issues in need of resolution

[Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>]

Greetings,
in the process of preparing the next version of -incoming, incorporating
the list-confirmed decisions of the Chicago WG meeting, a couple of
issues have been brought to light.

One concerns the granting of a license to the author to use the text
submitted for an RFC in other work - referred to in Chicago discussions
by the label of "SPARC addendum".

Two approaches have been suggested:

1) Insert a "read-only" license into -incoming, granting essentially the
same rights as is granted to any other reader, but linking them to the
submission agreement rather than to an IETF Trust grant decision:

> 5.10. Contributors retention of rights
> .br
> Notwithstanding any terms in this document to the contrary, in addition
> to any rights under copyright retained by Contributor and in addition to
> any rights generally granted by the TETF trust, Contributor retains, and
> grants to each Co-Contributor to an RFC in which such Contributor's
> Contribution, or a derivative work thereof may appear, the right:  .in +3
> .ti -3
> (A) to copy, publish, display, and distribute any RFC that includes the
> Contribution, in whole or in part, .ti -3
> (B) to prepare translations of such RFC into languages other than
> English, in whole or in part, and to copy, publish, display, and
> distribute such translations or portions thereof, and .ti -3
> (C) to reproduce any trademarks, service marks or trade names which are
> included in the RFC solely in connection with the reproduction,
> distribution or publication of the RFC thereof as permitted by this
> Section 5.10, provided that when reproducing RFCs, trademark and service
> mark identifiers used in the RFC, including TM and (R), will be preserved.
> .in -3
>
> Notwithstanding the above rights, the Contributor does not have the right
> to represent any document as an RFC, or equivalent to an RFC, if it is
> not a full and complete copy or translation of the published RFC.

2) Granting a special license to produce derivative works from the text
of the finished RFC, subject only to the limitation that the result
can't be presented as if it was an RFC.

The argument has been presented (in private) that the following
principles were "always implied" wrt RFCs:

	(1) The author(s) or editor(s) of an RFC were the
	authors/ editors.  The RFC Editor wasn't the author, an
	editor, or the owner of the document.  The RFC Editor
	acted as the agent of the author in adding any
	boilerplate and licenses, whether it was the early "...
	distribution unlimited..." or the current pages of ISOC/
	IETF Trust boilerplate.
	
	(2) If there was more than one author, they were the
	compilers of the document as a group and their joint
	efforts produced the document from their work and any
	other work that they incorporated and took
	responsibility for having the rights to use.
	
	(3) The author(s) granted the community the right to
	reproduce and use, but retained, as a group if there was
	more than one, "all rights" from a legal sense.

This, if taken as "the whole truth", does not seem consistent with the
model that's been in -incoming for a while, where the IETF Trust has
some rights in the RFC series, at least to the point of requiring that
derived works not be presented
as RFCs in the RFC series.

Input is sought on this issue.

The other issue, raised by Jorge Contreras, concerns the split of the
work of this WG into two documents (-incoming and -outgoing); if we
start having language in the -incoming document granting some outgoing
rights, the separation becomes rather blurred from his perspective.

The opposite viewpoint is that the two documents have distinct audiences
and distinct status in the IETF process, and that it therefore makes no
sense to merge them; such a merge would also be inconsistent with the
charter of the WG.

Input is sought on this issue too.

         Harald Alvestrand, WG chair




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