Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money

"Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com> Wed, 26 July 1995 13:59 UTC

Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 09:48:28 -0400
Sender: ietf-archive-request@IETF.CNRI.Reston.VA.US
From: "Donald E. Eastlake 3rd" <dee@cybercash.com>
To: "Jeffrey I. Schiller" <jis@mit.edu>
Cc: isoc trustees <isoc-trustees@linus.isoc.org>, ISOC Advisory Council <ISOC-Advisory-Council@linus.isoc.org>, ietf <ietf@CNRI.Reston.VA.US>, poised@tis.com
Subject: Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money
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I second Jeff's motion.  Clearly labeling RFC's as being in the public
domain is the way to go.  Then, no matter what happens to ISOC, the
standards are safe.  If anyone owns them, then financial or other
difficulties of that person (including legal persons like iSOC) are a
threat.

On Wed, 26 Jul 1995, Jeffrey I. Schiller wrote:

> 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.

This is the wrong place for the charge.  I'd be happy to go back to
paying $70 a year for my ISOC membership rather than imposing a
copying fee on RFCs.

> >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

Donald

PS: There was never any real need for a corporation to be formed in
the first place.  The IETF could have organized itself as an
unincoproated association.  This would still have been quite
contentious as it would require some sort of real by-laws/constitution
defining goveranance.

=====================================================================
Donald E. Eastlake 3rd     +1 508-287-4877(tel)     dee@cybercash.com
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R. e: ITU document server now costs money Jeffrey I. Schiller
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Donald E. Eastlake 3rd
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Karl Auerbach
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Theodore Ts'o
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Chris Shenton
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Perry E. Metzger
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money Karl Auerbach
R. e: ITU document server now costs money Dave Crocker
Re: R. e: ITU document server now costs money John Day