Re: Rights in early RFCs

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Friday, June 14, 2019 17:45 -0400 John R Levine
<[e-mail]> 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.

Yes.  Jon did.  More than once and under pressure from people
with whom he was usually fairly impatient.  I think it is a fair
summary of his personal preference -- about the series, not
[jist] things of which he was the author would be pretty close
to "just use it, ideally with credit as appropriate".  The bad
news was (and is) that things get complicated as soon as either
IPR lawyers or other people interested in talking about
"ownership" or either text or ideas -or- people who are inclined
to take the idea of others and try to pass them off as their own
get involved.   

Your notion of "US government works" didn't help either because
very few of the early authors were actually government employees
but, instead, were employees of various universities or [other[
government contractors.  A number of those organizations
successfully argued that they could, and would, do a better job
of technology transfer if they had ownership rights in whatever
they were producing than if the technology (and documents) were
free for anyone to pick up and use because the latter
organizations would have little incentive to commercial
technology for which they had no special rights.   (The
contemporary argument by various pharma companies that they
should be able to take federal funds to develop drugs that they
then patent is not much different from that old technology
transfer one.)  In addition, [D]ARPA, at least at that time, did
not do its own contracting and I have some reason to believe
(and think we discovered during those discussions) that the
details of the arrangements different contractor organizations
had with different contract management organizations differed,
and may have differed quite a bit.

One of the outcomes of the above was the general rule that
persisted into IETF Trust policy, i.e., that anyone can
reproduce RFC text as long as it remains intact and unchanged --
issues arise only if someone wants to make excerpts or derived
works.

There were several later rounds of conversations about the
general topic on which Scott Bradber would be m8ch more expert
than I am, but I'd be surprised if the answer from him would be
significantly different from the above.

You didn't identify you "we" was in your question but, if the
answer is, e.g., the IETF Trust, good luck and this is why we
pay you folks the big bucks.

   best,
     john