Re: Rights in early RFCs

["Joel M. Halpern" <[e-mail]>]

The Trust Legal Provisions give everyone the right to "to copy, publish, 
display and distribute unmodified portions of IETF Contributions and 
IETF Documents".  That seems pretty clear to me.  They have to attribute 
it properly.  And they have to keep our legends.  (Which they may not 
have gotten quite right, and is one of the things the trust will need to 
make sure they do get right.)

Given that the wording says "portions", I do not see that we can 
complain about their copying several portions.

If the community wants to change that, then it needs to say so.  As far 
as I know, these have been the rules for quite some time.

Yours,
Joel

On 6/16/19 4:18 AM, Keith Moore wrote:
> On 6/16/19 1:26 AM, Joel M. Halpern wrote:
> 
>> I think there are two separate issues.
>>
>> First, the way they structured their profile, they were making 
>> verbatim quotes, and then putting there own text around taht.  As far 
>> as I can tell, in terms of our copyright rules, we have said they have 
>> the right to do that.  I believe the trust will have to tell them that 
>> they have those rights.
> 
> I'm not sure that's actually true.   What's fairly clear (for various 
> reasons) is that they are free to reproduce the document in its 
> entirety.   It's not clear (to me at least) that they are free to 
> produce derivative works.   As for quoting, they may have some right to 
> do that in the US under fair use doctrine, but only for specific 
> purposes and within certain boundaries.   And the boundaries of fair use 
> are for the courts to decide, not the trust.
> 
> Keith
> 
>