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

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

> 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?

>> If you're wondering where the copyright or license info is for all of
>> the pre-3978 RFCs, other than a handful of licenses from ISI and a few
>> of the authors, there isn't any. As Joel noted, attempting to
>> determine the status of early RFCs would be a hugely expensive and
>> unproductive exercise in frustration. In a few cases I doubt that
>> anything short of a suit in a US federal court would resolve it (look
>> at RFC 20) and I hope none of us want to go there.
>
> 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.

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?

> I'm sorry if the tone comes across as adversarial, that is not the 
> intent. The intent is to capture the IETF community's expectations of 
> the Trust.

If that is truly the intent, I strongly encourage you to withdraw this 
error riddled draft and talk to the trustees about all the assertions you 
made so you can at least get your facts straight.

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.

Regards,
John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly