Re: Rights in early RFCs

[Joe Touch <[e-mail]>]

FWIW, IANAL but the agreements below affect only the editing and publication functions of ISI during the period indicated, which (AFAICT) was after Jon died.

I.e, this refers to the RFC Editor contributions. It does not appear (again, IANAL) to affect either previous works or even RFC work done by others during that period (granted that the ISOC started adding copyright statements to RFCs somewhere in that time too).

Joe

> On Jun 14, 2019, at 4:46 PM, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> John,
> 
> When we set up the IETF Trust, we did what we could to get all the rights. We discussed this actively in late 2006, and I found a list of test cases that includes RFC 791-793, but not RFC 768 for some reason. 
> 
> With a little research:
> ISI assigned all its rights to ISOC on May 2, 2007:
> https://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/Confirmatory_License_Pre_1998_Executed.pdf
> https://iaoc.ietf.org/documents/Confirmatory_Addendum_Post_1998_Executed.pdf
> 
> ISOC assigned all its rights in RFCs to the Trust in 2006 (April or thereabouts). I hope this was updated to cover the rights obtained from ISI, but I don't know about that since I left the Trust in March 2007. If it was overlooked, the Trust will need to fix it.
> 
> However, this certainly leaves open the question of the rights of the *authors* (or their estates) since there were no formalities in place, apart from whatever was hidden in employment contracts and USG-funded contracts. A few RFC authors signed a "Contributor Non-Exclusive Document License" to cover the pre-RFC5378 problem; I believe Steve Crocker signed one for RFC1, for example. But the Trust never followed up on this for the important early RFCs.
> 
> Regards
>   Brian Carpenter
> 
> On 15-Jun-19 09:45, John R Levine wrote:
>> We recently got an inquiry about RFC 768.  Jon Postel published it in 1980 
>> without a copyright notice, it's never been updated, and since it defines 
>> UDP, it's implemented in billions of devices around the world.
>> 
>> If someone wanted to reuse it, I can only guess where to ask.  Since Jon 
>> wrote it, perhaps it'd be his heirs, or perhaps it'd be USC since that's 
>> who he worked for, or perhaps it'd be nobody since the government funded 
>> him and US government works are P.D.
>> 
>> Has anyone ever tried to work out who owns what for the early RFCs?  I 
>> think I understand what the rules are from RFC 1602 onward, but there's a 
>> bunch of important ones earlier than that.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> John Levine, [e-mail], Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
>> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
>> 
>> PS: In case it's not clear, I'm not asking what anyone thinks the rules 
>> should be or should have been, I'm asking to what extent we know what they 
>> actually are.
>> 
>> 
>