Re: Editors vs Authors vs Contributors, was: ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

> > Because of the IPR implications, that probably should also include
> > contact info, just as for authors.
> 
> That would only arise for pre-RFC5378 text that is subject to the
> disclaimer clause *and* fails a "fair use" test. But it isn't much use
> anyway - the contact info in almost every older RFC is obsolete.

Well, it might also be useful post RFC-5378 if there was some claim
that someone had contributed text that was copyrighted by a third
party, in violation of IETF's policies.  But in order for that to be
useful, the editor would have had to have kept the document under some
kind of source code management system, or a long, painful search of
the mailing list archives would be necessary to see *who* contributed
the text in question, so the issue of who had cribbed copyrighted text
from whom could be clarified.

And of course, you're right that contact information changes so
rapidly that it would almost certainly be obsolete.  Fom a practical
perspective, obtaining at least the e-mail address and corporate
affiliation given a particular contributor name isn't hard, at least
at the time that he/she was participating in the working group.

The hard part is knowing for example, if AT&T were to come wanting to
hunt down who was responsible for including "exit 0" in some RFC
(since as we all know that is an unpublished, proprietary source code
subject to trade secret per AT&T's Unix sources for "/bin/true" :-)
that there be some way of figuring out who was responsible for
originally contributing that specific piece of the spec.  If it turns
out that person posted the text came from an ATT.COM address, and it
could be shown that he/she was given due notice of IETF's policies,
that would of course be highly useful; but you almost need to have an
SCM or be prepared to do a huge amount of searching of mailing list
traffic and face to face meetings minutes to be able to accurately
track attributions at that granularity.

Ultimately, I suspect the list of contributors is a good and polite
thing to do out of courtesy, but it's not all that useful from an IPR
point of view.  Even if there was code that you wanted to use from a
pre-RFC5378 text, you wouldn't need or want to contact *all* the
contributors; you would want to know who contributed the portion of
the RFC containing the code that you wanted to use in an
implementation (either proprietary or open source).

							- Ted
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