Re: Community Input on change to the Trust Legal Provisions to accommodate the inclusion of RFC Templates

"John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> Wed, 28 January 2015 03:17 UTC

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Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 03:16:39 -0000
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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: Community Input on change to the Trust Legal Provisions to accommodate the inclusion of RFC Templates
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>IANAL (other disclaimers incorporated by hand-waving), but a
>plain-English reading of this indicated that the text gives
>permission to modify the text of the template itself.

It does, but I don't see what practical problem this causes.

Templates are functional, so the copyrights on them are pretty thin in
the first place, and once extracted from the RFC without the rest of
the RFC text, what do we care?  We've allowed modified versions of
code components for quite a while, and as far as I know that hasn't
caused any problems for the IETF.

The proposed language looks OK to me.  I have no strong opinion
on the effect on RFCs derived from old RFCs but the chances of this
causing a problem in practice seem vanishingly small.

R's,
John