Re: legal consultation (was List moderator action)

[John R Levine <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, 8 May 2026, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>> That's not how copyright law works.
>
> Communities that set very similar terms to what I suggested do exist. One 
> relevant example is https://openverse.org/ where they say; "All Openverse 
> content is under a Creative Commons license or is in the public domain"

Sure, CC *or* public domain.  CC licenses are fine, if that's what you 
want.

> Many U.S. Government works are placed into the public domain by virtue of not 
> being granted copyright protections.

That is exactly the kind of country-specific stuff I was referring to. 
While the U.S. federal government has a policy of putting its works in the 
public domain, state governments can and do claim copyright.  In the UK 
and Commonwealth countries, national governments have and enforce Crown 
copyright.

> One is setting the expectation of content and the terms under which IETF will 
> treat the data moving forward. A reality here is that copyright abolition is 
> nearly here with automated consumption of all IETF data on a regular basis. 
> It may be that there will be meaningful push back on AI related copyright 
> abolition but I doubt it very much at this point.

It's much much more complicated than that.  Yes, AI bots are scraping the 
entire net.  I am following about a dozen lawsuits by newspapers and book 
authors against AI companies with various theories about why scraping is 
illegal.  No matter how they turn out, that only tells us about using 
material to train AI models, not the innumerable other ways one might use 
copyrighted material.

In any event, while I personally would prefer to get rid of the no 
derivatives exception, I do not think a wholesale rewrite of our IPR 
policies is in the cards so it's not worth arguing about.

R's,
John