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

[Lars Eggert <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

On 2022-10-22, at 19:02, John R Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> is that asset register publicly accessible?
> 
> It's on the Trust's web site, with a link on the home page.  But if you had trouble finding it, why didn't you ask?

well, I did find that page, and Section 2.4.1 of the I-D briefly discusses that it seems to be incomplete. I had hoped the Trust had a more detailed non-public asset registry it worked off of.

>> I thought that when the Trust was established, it was supposed to actively approach authors of pre-5378 documents, especially core Internet specifications, to get the copyrights signed over. Has that effort been abandoned?
> 
> I wasn't around in 2006, but if you had asked I would have told you that last year while I was a trustee I got licenses from two or three of the early authors who I knew.  Those are the ones that aren't in the asset register yet.

So that bring us back to Section 2.2, and the lack of published procedures for management of the Trust assets.

If individual authors signed copyrights over to the Trust, on what timeline can the community expect such actions to be reflected in the asset registry? What is the pipeline of such transactions and how does the Trust ensure that when individual Trustees acquire licenses those don't get lost when they rotate of the Trust? I also don't see this particular transfer of assets mentioned in the 2021 minutes or announcements.

The Trust's entire reason for being is to hold assets. I would expect a detailed archival record of such assets (and the procedures by which they are acquired, managed, licensed and possibly released) to be an absolute necessity for doing that. We can discuss how much of it should be public - I see no reason that all of it shouldn't be, but that is a separate discussion - but surely it needs to exist?

> But really, it's not that simple.  Anything published in the US before 1976 without a copyright notice is in the public domain.  In many cases it is unclear whether an author wrote an RFC as an individual, in which case he can license the rights, or as an employee in which case whoever he was working for at the time owns the rights, unless the employer was the US government in which case it's public domain.  In many cases the employers no longer exist, and I am unware of a practical way to figure out who might have inherited their assets.  In a few cases (RFC20) it is not clear whether the author even had the rights in the first place.
> 
> And of course, some authors are dead.  We believe that Jon Postel wrote all his RFCs as an ISI employee, and we have a license from ISI, so we're OK there.
> 
> Once again, if this was important, why didn't you ask?

You keep saying I didn't ask. We did ask, a copy of this I-D was sent to the Trustees for comment a few weeks back.

> I entirely agree that the trust's early recordkeeping was poor, and I was as surprised as anyone that there's supposed to be a decade old HSM somewhere.  But it is not 2006 any more, and I believe that the current trust is a lot different from what this document implies.

So this brings us back to Section 2.4. Once the Trust discovered that "early record keeping was poor" and that it has lost track of some assets, has it brought that up with the community and proposed a plan to rectify the situation?

Thanks,
Lars