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

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

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.