Re: Change in IPR policies

[Jay Daley <[e-mail]>]

I have reviewed the checkbox presented during registration that says "I understand that I may not distribute or broadcast any electronic recordings of meeting events (including plenaries, tutorials, working group sessions, etc.) without IETF’s prior written consent" and this checkbox will now be removed.

I want to apologise first for the overly broad scope of that statement, which is on me for not reviewing it before it went up, and second for not recognising the impact of this on the general IPR policy.  While the former issue may be fixable, the latter is not and so the checkbox needs to go.

As explained, the original intent was to prohibit livestreaming, which in combination with open jabber rooms would enable people to participate in sessions without registration.  The concern there was not to protect the income stream from the meeting, but to ensure that we respect and recognise the decision of those people who register and pay by not allowing an obvious backdoor that avoids that.

The decision about the audio stream was slightly different.  I mistakenly thought that this was discontinued a while ago and so took the decision not to turn it back on just for this meeting.  I would prefer to stick with that decision given that Meetecho allows people to watch/list to multiple streams at once and the concerns I’ve expressed above.

I understand the view that we should be using an honor system and seeing if that fails us first, and that was considered but the risk of doing that was seen as too great.  First, I think we all recognise now that the honor system is much less effective online than in-person for a variety of reasons including low barriers, limited repercussions and effective anonymity, and so the likelihood of the honor system working is much less than in-person.  Second, the consequence of getting it wrong could have been a large number of people abusing that and those who didn’t abuse it feeling very aggrieved at us for allowing that.

I welcome any further feedback.

Jay

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Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[e-mail]