Who owns the Internet Rules?

["Lawrence Rosen" <lrosen at rosenlaw.com>]

Thank you, Dave, for writing and sharing your excellent op-ed. It explains
much about the RFCs that have become the essential technical standards for
our Internet. 

Your history poses for me, a copyright lawyer, a fascinating legal issue:
Who owns the copyright in that RFC 1 that you worked on those
"nerve-wracking" days and nights long ago as a graduate student, and who
owns the copyrights in the more than 5,000 RFCs written by many others since
then?

Clearly that RFC 1 contains your words and so you own a copyright interest,
unless by force of law or contract you assigned your ownership interest to
someone else. Nothing you wrote suggests you ever did any such thing,
although perhaps (?) your faculty advisor or UCLA claims your work. I assume
you continue to own your RFC 1 words to this day and that you can copy,
modify, and distribute them without asking anyone else's permission.

But your history also tells a different story of copyright ownership. You
refer to a "network" of graduate students and staff from four universities
who worked together on this first RFC. "We thought maybe we'd put together a
few temporary, informal memos on network protocols, the rules by which
computers exchange information. I offered to organize our early notes." 

An organizer of notes is not usually the exclusive copyright owner of the
resulting document.

Throughout your article you describe the joint effort that you and your
co-authors undertook. "We started writing these notes..." and "we wrote our
visions of the future on paper..." are obvious indications that you didn't
create alone, those many years ago. The evolving RFC system that you helped
to create embodied an essential principle that guaranteed success: "Everyone
was welcome to propose ideas, and if enough people liked it and used it, the
design became a standard." 

That is the joint way that RFC creation has always worked, and as I've been
privileged to witness in recent years, so it works to this day.

You also described a publishing network that intended to be "a building
block available to others." Your "loose, unnamed meetings" became the
"Network Working Group" and ultimately the "Internet Engineering Task
Force." You describe "the culture" of IETF, and the word "we" correctly
dominates in your article.

Your history is a copyright law description of a "joint work". RFC 1 is not
owned exclusively by you--although you retain your ownership interest as I
described it above. But from the time of its publication forty years ago
this April 6, RFC 1 is the joint copyright of the informal organization that
has since evolved into the IETF Trust.

Thank you again!

/Larry
 
Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
707-485-1242 * cell: 707-478-8932 * fax: 707-485-1243
Skype: LawrenceRosen


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ietf-bounces at ietf.org [mailto:ietf-bounces at ietf.org] On Behalf Of
> Dave CROCKER
> Sent: Tuesday, April 07, 2009 4:20 AM
> To: IETF Discussion
> Subject: [Fwd: How the Internet Got Its Rules ]
> 
> 
>   <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/07/opinion/07crocker.html?_r=1&emc=eta1>

> 
> 
> Op-Ed Contributor
> By STEPHEN D. CROCKER
> Published: April 6, 2009
> 
> Bethesda, Md.
> 
> 
> TODAY is an important date in the history of the Internet: the 40th
> anniversary
> of what is known as the Request for Comments. Outside the technical
> community,
> not many people know about the R.F.C.'s, but these humble documents shape
> the
> Internet's inner workings and have played a significant role in its
> success...
> 
> --
> 
>    Dave Crocker
>    Brandenburg InternetWorking
>    bbiw.net
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