RE: #1511: Proposed resolution of Incoming 5.10: Back-license to document authors in resulting RFCs

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

--On Monday, 12 November, 2007 23:29 -0500 Black_David at emc.com
wrote:

> John,
> 
> While your internal counsel is almost certainly correct as far
> as his/her statement goes, there appear to be two cases that
> are not covered:

> (A) Whether each author need to receive "full" rights to the
> published 	RFC, as opposed to the "joint" rights.  This is
> primarily a 	question to John Klensin about what's needed for
> the academic 	institutions that he's expressed concern about -
> I've interpreted
> 	what he's written as requiring "full" rights to be returned to
> 	each author to get the multi-institution case right (as
> opposed 	to "joint" rights that each author can reserve), and
> would be 	quite happy to be wrong about this.

As far as the academic institutions are concerned, I frankly
don't know without checking and am out of the US and pressed for
time at the moment.  Perhaps someone with an appropriate
appointment and access to institutional lawyers who have been
active in that movement could check, or I'll get back to it at
the end of the week.

But the IETF tradition and long term assumption, at least as
I've understood it since Jon took over the RFC series, has
definitely been full rights.

> (B) The "derived works" case in which one or more authors
> revise 	an RFC that they did not originally write.  In this
> situation, 	publication of the revised RFC relies on the
> IETF's copyright 	in the original RFC, and absent some license
> to IETF's rights 	in the original RFC, the author or authors
> have rights *only* 	to their revisions, and not the resulting
> RFC.

Yes.  I have an opinion about that, based again on historical
assumptions, but it is clearly a more complex case if the old
authors are not actively part of the author team for the
revision.  The latter is more often the case than not in IETF
practice.  If the old authors are listed, and the "full"
provision in (A) applies, then this is a non-issue.

    john



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