Re: [Gendispatch] why the trust is not your lawyer

> On 31 Oct 2022, at 18:24, John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
> 
> It appears that Lloyd W  <lloyd.wood@yahoo.co.uk> said:
>> Did RFC9293 updating RFC793 for STD7 expose any copyright issues? I don't think RFC793 has a copyright statement, but wouldn't
>> presume 'govt contract, therefore no copyright'.
> 
> Keeping in mind that I am not your lawyer even more than the Trust is
> not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice:
> 
> RFC793 says it was written by ISI for DARPA. Without seeing the
> agreement between them there is no way to tell who owns the document.
> ISI has given a license to the Trust, and DARPA is the federal
> government which does not assert copyright so either way we seem to
> have the rights. It was written after 1976 so the lack of a copyright
> notice doesn't make any difference.
> 
> So for this particular document, I would say the copyright risk is
> very low. We have licenses for many early RFCs still in use, or
> believe they are out of copyright. RFCs 768 for UDP, 791 for IP, and
> 792 for ICMP, are all from ISI.
> 
> On the other hand, if we wanted to update RFC894, IP datagrams over
> Ethernet, that would be more of a problem. There's no trace of the
> author in our mail archive, his employer Symbolics went bankrupt, and
> it is unclear whether an apparent successor company owns the copyright
> on that document. But we can wait and burn that bridge if and when we
> get to it.

That’s excellent information, but it provides yet more evidence to me that information like this needs to recorded in a database so that we don’t have to rely on the memory of individuals and the ability of people to access that memory.

Jay

> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> -- 
> Gendispatch mailing list
> Gendispatch@ietf.org
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/gendispatch

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
exec-director@ietf.org