Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com> Thu, 12 May 2011 19:21 UTC

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Date: Thu, 12 May 2011 15:21:06 -0400
From: John C Klensin <john-ietf@jck.com>
To: Joe Touch <touch@isi.edu>, Steven Bellovin <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793
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--On Thursday, May 12, 2011 08:50 -0700 Joe Touch
<touch@isi.edu> wrote:

>> My comment was in reply to Masataka Ohta's note saying that he
>> often evades the pricing on things like IEEE or ACM pappers
>> by finding free ones online.  That looks like it won't be
>> possible going forward.
> 
> Current IEEE policy continues to allow authors to post the
> latest update prior to IEEE publication on their home site,
> with proper copyright notice and a link to the IEEE copy.
> 
> I.e., authors can currently post the last revision before IEEE
> formatting with IEEE logos for free.

Joe,

A different version of the point I was trying to make is that
any body that depends on publication revenues, special
subscriptions, or memberships and membership privileges to
support its work has to define a boundary that preserves some
value in those revenue sources.  Some of us may think that they
are going to need to find a new business model for their
activities, but that is really irrelevant to the present
conversation.  

It seems to me that the line IEEE is trying to draw is a
reasonable one given their problem and, modulo trying to
preserve something for which to charge, not that much different
from ours.  In many situations, the net effect is that, if I'm
interested in the content or substance of a given article, the
"approved submission" version should be more than sufficient.
If I need to quote exactly from it, reference material by page
number, etc., I need to get my hands on the final published
version and someone may have to pay IEEE for that.

Other than being careful about what versions of IEEE documents
are referenced normatively in RFCs (so that people are expected
to read and understand the referenced documents to implement the
RFC), it still doesn't seem to me that IEEE's policies, or what
documents can be found where and at what prices, are an IETF
problem.

   john


    john