Re: [Rswg] [Ext] typesetting is fun, It is time to get rid of PDF

> On 13 Apr 2024, at 00:57, Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Okay, legals calls are for lawyers and their clients. But neither you nor the RSWG are the client. If there was a legal issue, it is most likely the IETF or its associated organizations that are at risk - they are the client.  If this is an actual legitimate concern of yours, ask Jay for the IETF’s input. Either way, not a decision for this group.
> 
> Exactly. I think that each party that is likely to receive subpoenas needs to *formally* state their requirement after getting legal advice from their own counsel. Then the RSWG can formulate an appropriate formal requirement in a draft that we submit to the RSAB.
> 
> Which parties? I suggest the IETF Trust, IETF LLC, the RPC and the Secretariat. (The RPC and the Secretariat are not part of the LLC.) Given the copyright statement in some older RFCs, to be complete we'd have to include the ISOC, except that PDF is already published for those RFCs.

The LLC has ultimate legal responsibility here so the LLC can indeed answer this.

This is not a question of “what are we legally required to produce in response to a declaration request” but more about the practical considerations of what we produce.

Our responses to declaration requests are largely of the form “RFC/I-D X was available at time T”. This is nearly always provided in the form of a PDF, but sometimes a hard copy.   Most importantly it is a single document with the three key things - declaration, signature and, if requested, a copy of the RFC/I-D in question.  That encapsulation provides a guarantee of authenticity of the included RFC/I-D. 

If the reply were to be in any other format and a copy of the RFC/I-D requested as part of it then the complications of providing the same guarantee are simply not worth it. Therefore, even if RFCs are no longer published in PDF format, a PDF would be provided.  That would mean a PDF being manually created from either the plain text or HTML rendering.  I assume the HTML to ensure that diagrams are included but I may be wrong.  Given the low volume of requests, this is not a problem.  

What is worth considering more, is how this would work if two changes to the policy took place - to stop producing PDFs as a matter of course, and to allow versions of RFCs  In that case, and assuming we needed the HTML to ensure diagrams are included, copies of the HTML of each version need to be kept, and either a copy of that rendered into HTML is kept with it, or there needs to be a guarantee that these can be rendered into PDF when needed even if that is forty years later.  There may also be a requirement to protect against subtle tampering with the HTML.  

Given all that fuss, I can imagine it being much easier to store a PDF of the HTML of any archived version at the time of archiving.  

To summarise, there is no legal issue here at all.

Jay

-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director 

> 
>    Brian
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