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

John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> Mon, 31 October 2022 18:24 UTC

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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: gendispatch@ietf.org
Cc: lloyd.wood@yahoo.co.uk
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Subject: Re: [Gendispatch] why the trust is not your lawyer
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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.

R's,
John

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