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Re: legal consultation (was List moderator action)

John Levine <johnl@ietf.email> Fri, 08 May 2026 17:28 UTC

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Date: Fri, 08 May 2026 13:28:16 -0400
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From: John Levine <johnl@ietf.email>
To: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: legal consultation (was List moderator action)
In-Reply-To: <3c1c7b27-14fa-4544-8e81-0379e541cda1@appelbaum.net>
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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It appears that Jacob Appelbaum  <jacob@appelbaum.net> said:
>Could we set the standard that people making contributions are 
>automatically placed into the public domain?

That's not how copyright law works.  The rules for public domain vary a lot
from one country to another.  In some European countries there are rights
you cannot disclaim, so you can't put your work into the P.D. even if you
wanted.

Also, I do not think we would want our documents to be public domain.  Someone
could take a draft or an RFC, change a few numbers and change MUST to MUST NOT in a few
places, distribute a broken version, and we would have no recourse.

We are fortunate that our copyright policies were designed by a lawyer who
is literally the world's greatest expert on the topic and has published
scholarly papers about it.  Tweaking it around the edges makes sense,
throwing it out would not.

R's,
John

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