RE: [Trustees] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your reviewand comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

["Contreras, Jorge" <[e-mail]>]

Eric,

Thank you for the careful reading and constructive suggestions.

>     This document contains material from IETF Documents or IETF
>     Contributions published before November 10, 2008 and, to the
>     Contributor?s knowledge, the person(s) controlling the 
> copyright in
>     such material have not granted the IETF Trust the right to allow
>     modifications of such material outside the IETF Standards Process.
>     Without obtaining an adequate license from the person(s) 
> controlling
>     the copyright, this document may not be modified outside the IETF
>     Standards Process, and derivative works of it may not be created
>     outside the IETF Standards Process, except to format it for
>     publication as an RFC and to translate it into languages 
> other than
>     English.
> 
> The first problem here is the phrase "and, to the Contributor's
> knowledge, the person(s) controlling the copyright in such material
> have not granted the IETF Trust the right...". As I read this, I am
> directly affirming my belief that there are copyright holders who have
> not granted these rights. This is all fine if I know exactly who the
> original copyright holders are and that they have not given
> permission, but the more likely case is that I don't know one way or
> the other, and am simply unwilling to affirm the converse.
> However, I am equally unwilling to affirm my knowledge and belief
> that the persons controlling the copyright have not made grants.
> I simply don't know. This text should be rewritten as:
> 
>     This document contains material from IETF Documents or IETF
>     Contributions published before November 10, 2008. Some material
>     may be subject to copyright claims for which the holders have not
>     granted the IETF Trust the right to allow modifications of such
>     material outside the IETF Standards Process.

With a little bit of wordsmithing, I think that rephrasing this sentence
is fine.

> 
> In addition, the final sentence "Without obtaining..." seems overly
> strong. It's phrased as if it were a condition imposed by the
> contributor, i.e., I the contributor doesn't license you to use
> this document unless you obtain "adequate" permission from 
> the original
> copyright holders (with the contributor to be the judge of adequate,
> perhaps). But that's not what's in play here. Rather,
> it's that I the contributor can't give me license to material
> I don't control. So, this sentence serves as advice, not
> a license restriction 

Actually, this is not correct.  The sentence *is* intended as a license
restriction, not merely advice.  Remember:  all of this language is
being included pursuant to the authority granted to the Trust under
Section 5.3.c of RFC 5378, which allows a Contributor to limit the
Trust's right to grant derivative works (and thus avoid non-compliance
with the warranty contained in Section 5.6.c).

Thus, I'm happy to discuss re-wording the sentence to make it clearer,
but changing its meaning in this way would not allow the Trust to
address this issue within the parameters of RFC 5378.

> and should be rewritten accordingly.
> Perhaps:
> 
>     Modification or creation of derivative works outside of the
>     scope of RFC 4978 may require obtaining a license from the
>     person(s) controlling the copyright on the relevant sections
>     of the document. 
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