Re: [Gendispatch] the trust is not your lawyer, or I-D Action: draft-eggert-ietf-and-trust-00.txt

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

+1 to everything John says.

To be clear, both the text of the "NON-EXCLUSIVE LICENSE" that I and others signed, and the wording of the pre-5378 disclaimer (Section 6.c.iii of the TLP) were designed to avoid putting the Trust in the line of fire if any copyright dispute arose.

If I, as a signer of the non-exclusive license, purported to grant rights that I didn't actually have, that wouldn't be the Trust's problem. That's why I was happy that IBM also signed the license (and why I'm unhappy that it's apparently been mislaid).

For the Trust to make assertions about any specific pre-5378 RFCs would be foolish. Running a new campaign to obtain non-exclusive licenses might be useful.

Regards
    Brian
On 26-Oct-22 06:37, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that John Levine  <[e-mail]> said:
>> 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.
> 
> I take that back, it wouldn't just be no benefit, it would be a significant risk.
> 
> For 3978 and later RFCs we can state with confidence what our rights are and
> what licenses we offer.  For earlier ones we can only guess, and due to the
> way copyright works, if we guessed wrong, it could be very very expensive.
> 
> Consider RFC 854, which defines Telnet.  It was written by Jon Postel and
> Joyce Reynolds, and published without a copyright notice in 1983.  Both of the
> authors are now dead, neither gave a license to the trust.  (Postel could
> not have since he died long before the trust was created.)  I think that
> they were both working for ISI when they wrote it, and that they probably
> did so as part of their ISI duties, so our license from ISI probably
> covers it.  But academic institutions sometimes have copyright carveouts
> in their employee agreements so they can publish journal papers.  I
> have no idea if USC or ISI did that.  I do not know who the authors'
> heirs are nor how they feel about that document or any other.  ISI has
> an archive of Postel's email and I do not know if there is anything
> about that RFC in the mail.
> 
> Given the overall situation and the authors' relation to the IETF, my
> personal opinion is that it is OK for the IETF to reuse that material.
> I am less sure that the ISI license lets the trust relicense it under
> the TLP, which would allow anyone to, say, translate it into Chinese
> and put it in a book. If the Trust purported to grant a license under
> the TLP and it turned out not to have the rights, the penalties for
> copyright infringement, even well-intentioned innocent infringement,
> mount up very fast.
> 
> But that is a personal opinion; if you want a legal opinion, ask an IP
> lawyer, and that will get you an opinion about one (1) RFC.
> 
> R's,
> John
> 
> PS: If this sounds like a total clusterf*, yes indeed. That's why we
> got one of the best IP lawyers in the world to help us draft 3978 and
> 5378 so for RFCs published after March 2005, we don't have this problem.
>