draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-00 and the risk of "false RFCs"

Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> Fri, 18 February 2005 17:53 UTC

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Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 18:13:52 +0100
From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>
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Subject: draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-00 and the risk of "false RFCs"
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"Extracting RFCs", draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-00, says:

> It would clearly be confusing if someone could take an IETF standard
> such as RFC 3270 (MPLS Support of Differentiated Services), change a
> few key words and republish it, maybe in a textbook, as the
> definitive standards for MPLS Support of Differentiated Services.

I owe to Glenn Maynard what seems to be a fatal flaw in that
reasoning. Glenn said:

> Further, nothing prevents me from writing up my own bogus standard
> and calling it "RFC 3270 (MPLS Support of Differentiated Services)";
> since it's not a derivative work of the other RFC 3270, its
> copyright license is irrelevant.

So, the restriction on modification of RFCs does *not* prevent
misrepresentation. Copyright only prevents you to *modify* a RFC, not
to *pose* as such.

It seems the only protections against this misrepresentation are
trademarks ("do not dare to call your thing Coca-Cola!"), which are
used, for instance, by some free software projects (Mozilla and
NetBSD, for instance) or may be legal action for deception (I'm not
sure of the legal word in english, but, in France, you can certainly
sue for "tromperie" if someone publishes a text posing as a standard).

Comments?


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