Re: [Gendispatch] I-D Action: draft-eggert-ietf-and-trust-00.txt

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Jay Daley  <[e-mail]> said:
>Maybe I’m missing something obvious, but how is it a “tremendous amount of work” to have a database (or even a spreadsheet) that lists every RFC and the
>known licensing of each one, even if that is just ‘unknown’?  
>
>I’m sure it would be straightforward to add that into Datatracker. 

I suppose we could create a database that says UNKNOWN for every RFC
up to 3977 and TLP for everything after that, but more detail than
that would indeed be a huge amount of work, providing no benefit
that I can see.

Determining the copyright status of each pre-3978 RFC is a fact
specific labor intensive project. Who are the authors? What if any
copyright notice does the RFC have? Have the authors licensed rights?
(in most cases, no.) If there were multiple authors and one licensed
his rights, did he have authority to act for the rest of the authors?

Did the author(s) write the RFC as part of their job in which case the
rights belong to whoever they were working for, or as individuals? If
the former, do we have a license from the employer (unless it was ISI,
probably not.) Were they working for the US government which does not
assert copyright on its works? Etc., etc.

The vast majority of early RFCs are of purely historical interest.  No
new RFC will use text from them, so their copyright status does not matter.

Occasionally someone does want to use old material, at which point the
new authors look at all of those questions and try to figure out who
has the rights and whether they can use it. This has been happening
occasionally ever since we published RFC 3978.

I do not see why that would now be the trust's responsibility -- its
job is to hold whatever IP assets the IETF owns, not to be its legal
research department.

R's,
John