Re: who has the,problem here, really?

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

--On Friday, March 13, 2009 10:13 +1300 Brian E Carpenter
<brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2009-03-13 08:02, Scott Brim wrote:
> ...
>> This is an interesting idea.  Or even better, push it
>> outside.  I'm being a little impatient here but I've been
>> taught to ask who has the problem here, really?  It's the
>> people who want to use the work outside of the IETF.  
> 
> That's correct, and it's quite clear that ultimately there is
> no way out of that. However, the case made during the IPR WG
> discussions was that it isn't just the 1 in a thousand case of
> handing off a standard to another SDO that matters. It's any
> case where a 3rd party wants to use text for any purpose, such
> as commenting a piece of code or writing a product manual.
> That's why, IMHO, a reasonable effort as described in
> draft-carpenter-5378-old-text is a reasonable thing to
> require. To my mind that is the main discussion point here.

Brian,

In the hope of clarifying and perhaps providing a basis for
moving forward...

(1) I am a lot more concerned about the "other SDO" case than I
am about commenting code and I am more concerned about
commenting code than about writing product manuals.  The first
case is, as Ray points out, a 1 in 5000 situation and, fwiw, I
believe there is an alternate solution.   For most of the
product manual cases, I'd actually prefer that people
paraphrase, assert conformance, and point to the real spec.
Most of the places where people "need" to use modified excerpts
of RFC text are going to involve non-conforming cases that are
"nearly-like" IETF specs.  Whether the IETF and the Trustees
want to authorize that or not, I don't see it as important
enough _to the IETF_ to justify requiring extra work from
authors or requiring that they assume extra liability.  I think
that leaves some edge cases, but their magnitude, while larger
that that 1/5000 still does not, IMO, justify passing extra
burdens onto every author of every document.

(2) The WG clearly asked for a higher level of effort than I'm
anticipating.  As I said in an earlier note, I believe that the
discussions on the IETF list override that decision, whether the
WG still believes in its earlier decision or not.  And I believe
that it may not.

(3) My primary concern remains the problem of asking authors to
assume liability for things that they don't know and don't have
much control over.  While I've actually done it for one or two
of the documents I've worked on, I don't want to put authors
into the position where they have to explicitly track the origin
of every sentence (or even every paragraph) of documents.  I
don't want them to have a assume responsibility for the
positions of path employers, co-authors, etc., or liability for
that responsibility.  I don't want to insist that authors try to
contact past employers to obtain additional rights from them
when the relationships with those employers may be perceived as
difficult.

Now, if the WG really still wants to push authors in this
direction (and is convinced that it can persuade the IETF on
another last call), I could live with some sort of three-way
split at the discretion of the posting author (I am deliberately
not suggesting wording that would be suitable for incorporating
in boilerplate... that is a legal problem to be sorted out by
lawyers if we can agree on the concepts).

	(i) I've got all of the relevant rights that 5378
	requests and give them to the IETF Trust as it specifies.
	
	(ii) I've made a best-effort attempt to obtain the
	rights consistent with the intent of 5378 and am giving
	what I have gotten to the IETF Trust.  I believe, in
	good faith, that the rights I've gotten are all that is
	needed, but, if they turn out not to be, I'm making no
	guarantees and assuming no liability, i.e., if the IETF
	Trust decides to treat rights to this document as
	belonging to them under 5378, it is on their heads (or
	anyone's head they pass the risk onto), not mine.
	
	(iii) I'm actually pretty sure that I don't have all of
	the needed rights, either because I tried to get them
	and failed or because I have reason to believe that
	there may be Contributors who have not been identified.
	I'm transferring my own rights under 5378, but anything
	else is covered by a disclaimer equivalent to the
	workaround text.

As usual, there are edge cases in which the author may have
obtained most of the rights needed but _still_ believe that
there are some plausible claimants out there (or may have gotten
one rejection when the request was made).  I do not believe
those situations should lead to a demand that submitting authors
identify every Contributor, their contributions, and the status
of their rights grants to the IETF -- that would just be too
burdensome for its value.   It is partially consideration of
those mixed cases --something that the WG never, as least as far
as I can remember, actively considered-- that leads me to
believe that the original conclusion was incorrect, i.e., that
the responsibilities for going around gathering up releases and
licenses and then guaranteeing that everything had been found
should be transferred to authors as a condition for document
posting.

    john