Re: Complaint to IAB regarding non-transparency

["Rob Wilton (rwilton)" <[e-mail]>]

Hi Dan,

Thank you for your dubious layman legal opinion, but it seems to completely ignore derived works.

But I’m not legally qualified and hence I’ll decline to debate you on the correct legal interpretation of BCP 78.  If I need an interpretation (and I don’t) then I will choose to consult a real lawyer.

I think that my participation in this thread has gone way past the point of usefulness, so write whatever you want in reply, I’ll ignore it.  Please don’t take that as an indication that I’m agreeing with you since that seems very unlikely to be the case.

Kind regards,
Rob



From: D. J. Bernstein <[e-mail]>
Date: Thursday, 9 October 2025 at 15:45
To: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Cc: [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Complaint to IAB regarding non-transparency
Rob Wilton (rwilton) writes:
> If someone writes an email during a review saying that "you should use
> a foo widget" here, and then I add modify the WG draft with my own
> text adding a foo widget, then my understanding, and IANAL so could
> easily be wrong, is that this could be construed as a derived work
> from the original idea/suggestion in your email.

No, copyrights don't prohibit copying of ideas. You think that, every
time a company takes an idea from a paper, it needs to ask the authors
for a copyright license? Maybe you're confusing copyrights with patents.

All of these arguments along the lines of "I think IETF needs a giant
copyright grab because here's a specific legitimate activity that I
don't realize coypright law allows anyway" are out of whack with the
clear text of BCP 78. BCP 78 makes sure that IETF has a copyright
license to publish I-Ds/RFCs and to modify standards-track I-Ds/RFCs.
BCP 78 meanwhile explicitly allows non-standards-track documents to opt
out of allowing modifications.

> you believe that everyone except you is doing the IETF process wrongly.

An IETF-wide survey carried out by IETF LLC in 2024 asked a variety of
questions. One question was whether "The IETF produces RFCs that reflect
IETF consensus". Allowed answers were "almost always", "often",
"sometimes", "rarely", and "almost never". Only 31% of 1060 respondents
agreed with "almost always". Check out page 19, Q25, of the survey:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20250716022742/https://www.ietf.org/media/documents/IETF_Community_Survey_2024.pdf<https://web.archive.org/web/20250716022742/https:/www.ietf.org/media/documents/IETF_Community_Survey_2024.pdf>

Beware that the text isn't searchable. (And, yikes, it's a PDF! How dare
IETF LLC post documents in this outlawed format?)

Evidently I'm in the majority of IETF participants seeing that RFCs
_don't_ always reflect IETF consensus, despite IETF LLC claiming in

    https://web.archive.org/web/20250528213926/https://www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-llc-statement-competition-law-issues/<https://web.archive.org/web/20250528213926/https:/www.ietf.org/blog/ietf-llc-statement-competition-law-issues/>

that "Decision-making requires achieving broad consensus via these
public processes".

So, no, it isn't everyone but me "doing the IETF process wrongly". It's
some powerful Internet companies such as Cisco, Google, and Microsoft
again and again ramming non-consensual "standards" through the IETF
process, to the detriment of everybody else.

  [ regarding clicking on links: ]
> Your reply brought a smile to my face:

My apologies if my point about IETF management not following its own
rules wasn't getting through clearly.

The idea that a link ending ".html" is safer than a link ending ".pdf"
is ludicrously wrong. I click on links all the time, using Qubes and
other security tools to control the related risks. But this doesn't mean
that I'm going to waste time reading through random garbage.

> You won't click on a URL that I provide to an IETF hosted webpage on
> the data tracker, but you expect folks to click on a link to a
> privately hosted PDF when processing your appeals.  Different rules
> for different people, I guess.

RFC 2026 requires IESG to attempt to handle appeals. RFC 2026 doesn't
place any requirements upon the format of appeals, so IESG is violating
RFC 2026 if it uses appeal format as an excuse to disregard an appeal.
Equating IESG with other IETF participants is wrong.

In non-corrupt systems, it's normal for positions of power to be
subjected to requirements that aren't applied to everybody else,
reducing the chance of the power being abused.

---D. J. Bernstein

P.S. For readers bumping into this message who haven't seen the context:
Please see https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html to understand
what's actually going on here.


===== NOTICES REGARDING IETF =====

It has come to my attention that IETF LLC believes that anyone filing a
comment, objection, or appeal is engaging in a copyright giveaway by
default, for example allowing IETF LLC to feed that material into AI
systems for manipulation. Specifically, IETF LLC views any such material
as a "Contribution", and believes that WG chairs, IESG, and other IETF
LLC agents are free to modify the material "unless explicitly disallowed
in the notices contained in a Contribution (in the form specified by the
Legend Instructions)". I am hereby explicitly disallowing such
modifications. Regarding "form", my understanding is that "Legend
Instructions" currently refers to the portion of

    https://web.archive.org/web/20250306221446/https://trustee.ietf.org/wp-content/uploads/Corrected-TLP-5.0-legal-provsions.pdf<https://web.archive.org/web/20250306221446/https:/trustee.ietf.org/wp-content/uploads/Corrected-TLP-5.0-legal-provsions.pdf>

saying that the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow
modifications nor to allow publication as an RFC" must be expressed in
the following form: "This document may not be modified, and derivative
works of it may not be created, and it may not be published except as an
Internet-Draft". That expression hereby applies to this message.

I'm fine with redistribution of copies of this message. There are no
confidentiality restrictions on this message. The issue here is with
modifications, not with dissemination.

For other people concerned about what IETF LLC is doing: Feel free to
copy these notices into your own messages. If you're preparing text for
an IETF standard, it's legitimate for IETF LLC to insist on being
allowed to modify the text; but if you're just filing comments then
there's no reason for this.