R. e: ITU document server now costs money

["Jeffrey I. Schiller" <[e-mail]>]

At 6:07 7/26/95, Vinton G. Cerf wrote:
>Although I don't think we need to prolong this discussion,
>it would make an interesting exercise to try to figure out
>what we would have to "charge" if we had to recover the
>administrative costs of the editing and secretariat functions
>only out of RFC/Standard downloads. We probably don't have enough
>data on RFC consumption to do that computation because of the
>widespread mirroring and lack of data on downloads.
>
>It would be interesting to discover we could do it cheaply enough
>that people would willingly pay the small fee in return for
>having a fully independent administrative operation.
>
>Please, everybody, I am NOT suggesting we should do this, just
>curious about our economics.

Even contemplating doing this is probably a bad idea. I believe that the
free access to Internet Standards is one of the fundamental core values of
the IETF community (or at least it was...).

In fact this thread has sufficiently scared me that I believe that the
POISED IPR process should consider removing the "grant copyright to ISOC"
aspect of RFC publication and replace it with a "commit this information to
the public domain" (or some similar wording) statement.

                                -Jeff