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

["Lawrence Rosen" <[e-mail]>]

Ted Hardie asked me:
> Are you willing to personally indemnify the individuals who are later
> sued by those who don't hold this view or are you willing to pay for
> the appropriate insurance cover?

Of course not. Are you (or your company) warning me that *you* might sue me
for infringement of anything you contributed to a joint industry standard
RFC? If so, thanks for the warning. Now, I'll ignore it. As I hope will most
of the people and companies who rely on IETF RFCs. You can't threaten me by
listing hundreds of people who had something to do with an RFC in the past.
Or make me beg you or your company or any of those people for permission in
order to treat an industry standard as a part of our common heritage with
the authority in the IETF Trust to deal with it (as a copyrighted document)
as it wishes in the public interest.

> It would be reasonable for everyone in that list to believe that
> their work could be re-used within the IETF context (it post
> dates RFC 2026 sufficiently for that).   We have now changed
> the rules such that their work can be used in other contexts,
> provided the Trust authorizes it; prior to that, the individuals
> would have had to authorize it.

Under US law, a joint copyright owner doesn't have to ask anyone's
permission to change the rules. Sorry you don't like that. Or are you
threatening to sue the IETF Trust if it changes the rules? Based on what
legal principle?

/Larry



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ted Hardie [mailto:[e-mail]]
> Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 11:42 AM
> To: [e-mail]; 'IETF Discussion'
> Subject: RE: [Trustees] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your
> reviewand comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem
> 
> At 11:09 AM -0800 1/9/09, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
> >We should accept the notion that IETF, and
> >now the IETF Trust, as a public interest corporation that manages the
> >expressive creative activities through which these joint works are
> written,
> >is the joint owner of copyright in every RFC. As such, a license from the
> >IETF Trust is all we need to create derivative works, without even asking
> >the co-authors of those old (or new) documents.
> >
> >Does anyone here believe that the IETF Trust doesn't own a joint
> copyright
> >interest in every RFC it publishes and can thus authorize derivative
> works
> >of those RFCs? [1]
> 
> Are you willing to personally indemnify the individuals who are later
> sued by those who don't hold this view or are you willing to pay for
> the appropriate insurance cover?
> 
> Take a look for a moment at RFC 2822.  It is a successor to a document
> that does not contain an ISOC copyright (because ISOC came into being
> approximately 10 years later).  It does have an ISOC copyright
> but RFC 2822 also has a very extensive list of contributors:
> 
>    Matti Aarnio              Barry Finkel           Larry Masinter
>    Tanaka Akira              Erik Forsberg          Denis McKeon
>    Russ Allbery              Chuck Foster           William P McQuillan
>    Eric Allman               Paul Fox               Alexey Melnikov
>    Harald Tveit Alvestrand   Klaus M. Frank         Perry E. Metzger
>    Ran Atkinson              Ned Freed              Steven Miller
>    Jos Backus                Jochen Friedrich       Keith Moore
>    Bruce Balden              Randall C. Gellens     John Gardiner Myers
>    Dave Barr                 Sukvinder Singh Gill   Chris Newman
>    Alan Barrett              Tim Goodwin            John W. Noerenberg
>    John Beck                 Philip Guenther        Eric Norman
>    J. Robert von Behren      Tony Hansen            Mike O'Dell
>    Jos den Bekker            John Hawkinson         Larry Osterman
>    D. J. Bernstein           Philip Hazel           Paul Overell
>    James Berriman            Kai Henningsen         Jacob Palme
>    Norbert Bollow            Robert Herriot         Michael A. Patton
>    Raj Bose                  Paul Hethmon           Uzi Paz
>    Antony Bowesman           Jim Hill               Michael A. Quinlan
>    Scott Bradner             Paul E. Hoffman        Eric S. Raymond
>    Randy Bush                Steve Hole             Sam Roberts
>    Tom Byrer                 Kari Hurtta            Hugh Sasse
>    Bruce Campbell            Marco S. Hyman         Bart Schaefer
>    Larry Campbell            Ofer Inbar             Tom Scola
>    W. J. Carpenter           Olle Jarnefors         Wolfgang Segmuller
>    Michael Chapman           Kevin Johnson          Nick Shelness
>    Richard Clayton           Sudish Joseph          John Stanley
>    Maurizio Codogno          Maynard Kang           Einar Stefferud
>    Jim Conklin               Prabhat Keni           Jeff Stephenson
>    R. Kelley Cook            John C. Klensin        Bernard Stern
>    Steve Coya                Graham Klyne           Peter Sylvester
>    Mark Crispin              Brad Knowles           Mark Symons
>    Dave Crocker              Shuhei Kobayashi       Eric Thomas
>    Matt Curtin               Peter Koch             Lee Thompson
>    Michael D'Errico          Dan Kohn               Karel De Vriendt
>    Cyrus Daboo               Christian Kuhtz        Matthew Wall
>    Jutta Degener             Anand Kumria           Rolf Weber
>    Mark Delany               Steen Larsen           Brent B. Welch
>     Steve Dorner              Eliot Lear             Dan Wing
>    Harold A. Driscoll        Barry Leiba            Jack De Winter
>    Michael Elkins            Jay Levitt             Gregory J. Woodhouse
>    Robert Elz                Lars-Johan Liman       Greg A. Woods
>    Johnny Eriksson           Charles Lindsey        Kazu Yamamoto
>    Erik E. Fair              Pete Loshin            Alain Zahm
>    Roger Fajman              Simon Lyall            Jamie Zawinski
>    Patrik Faltstrom          Bill Manning           Timothy S. Zurcher
>    Claus Andre Farber        John Martin
> 
> It would be reasonable for everyone in that list to believe that
> their work could be re-used within the IETF context (it post
> dates RFC 2026 sufficiently for that).   We have now changed
> the rules such that their work can be used in other contexts,
> provided the Trust authorizes it; prior to that, the individuals
> would have had to authorize it.    To let the Trust authorize that without
> explicit permission requires us to believe that everyone in that
> list (and every other similar list) either believed at the time
> that their work could be so used, believes now that it can
> be so used, or is sufficiently laissez-faire that they won't
> do anything to stop it, even if they don't agree.
> 
> My reading of John's point is that this creates either a coordination
> burden or a legal risk for the authors re-using text created prior to
> the new rules. He doesn't want to bear that burden/risk, and I don't
> think the Trust can (because it would have to analyze each document
> prior to assuming it, as it would be otherwise trivial for
> someone to submit a draft that clearly had no permission from
> the copyright holders).
> 
> He wants an out that says "I'm granting these rights to
> my text, you worry about any other rights".   As a transition
> to text based on documents written within the new rules,
> that may be the way to go.  What none of us wants is to
> have to restart this conversation at ground zero, because a lot
> of the other rights (like re-using code) set out in the new
> document should be applying to new work in new drafts now.
> 
> Just my two cents, untarnished by law degrees or other
> impediments.
> 		regards,
> 				Ted Hardie

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