Re: Rights in early RFCs

[Michael StJohns <[e-mail]>]

On 6/14/2019 10:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> On 15-Jun-19 12:38, Joe Touch wrote:
>> 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.
> No, pre-October 1998 is specifically included in the first one. The two are slightly different for reasons that various lawyers no doubt explained at the time.
>   
>> 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).
> It applies to all rights that ISI *might have had*, which is all they could offer. It doesn't apply to any rights that third parties might have had, obviously. So it is the maximum that ISI could offer, which is all we could ask for. (IANAL, but I was in the discussion loop with the Trust's lawyer.)
FWIW, RFC768 would have been considered a work-for-hire by Jon on behalf 
of ISI, and ISI could then grant the rights wherever they wanted that 
wasn't inconsistent with the contract between ISI and the US Government 
that covered Jon's work.

In any event, that contract would have been subject to the FARs (Federal 
Acquisition regulations) and see 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States#Works_produced_by_contractors 
for a fairly decent explanation.   From what I remember of my DDNPMO 
days, I don't believe any of the support contracts for ARPANET, Milnet 
or the NIC included the Alternate IV clause.

You *could* ask the various US agencies for a grant of rights for any of 
the RFCs that you don't have a clear license for.  Getting  US DOD, NSF, 
NASA and DOE sign offs should be sufficient to clear most of the earlier 
documents as those were the primary agencies funding work that became 
RFCs. As an alternate approach, NTIA should be able to sign off for the 
entire US government.

Note that there are a few RFCs that were authored by US Government 
employees - those are public domain and no license is necessary.

Mike


> That's why the "Contributor Non-Exclusive Document License" was invented, and why it's unfortunate that it doesn't seem to have been followed up for the important early RFCs. The blank form used to be available on the Trust web site, but no longer is (https://trustee.ietf.org/assets.html). I signed it, which effectively means that all my RFCs are under RFC5378 conditions. Either the Trust or the IETF LLC archives should contain such licenses as were signed.
>
> There's the FAQ, of course: https://trustee.ietf.org/reproduction-rfcs-faq.html
>
>     Brian
>
>