Re: Proposed IESG statement on referencing documents behind a paywall

[Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 10:24:43AM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
>     > Maybe the easiest way would be to find someone friendly at IEEE to sponsor a
>     > corporate account at IEEE or the like to enable this.
> 
> And how does having this support permission-less innovation?

Its actually quite interesting for the context of this discussion to
read and understand BIS EAR 734.7. Not because it defines that
"published" documents are free to be exported to everybody,
but because of how it defines "published".

https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/retrieveECFR?gp=&SID=4a26f77ee4d04cf3fea9ef8226268f9d&mc=true&n=pt15.2.734&r=PART&ty=HTML#se15.2.734_17

To paraphrase:

| A document is "published" ...  if it has been made available to the public
| without restrictions on its further dissemination.

The reason why documents like the one from IEEEE behind a paywall are
considered published is this point: 

| (dissemination such as through any of the following...)
| (2) Libraries or other public collections that are open and available to
| the public, and from which the public can obtain tangible or intangible
| documents.

I understand how you would rather like to declare external standards to
ONLY be "good" if they match the alternative point:

| (4) Public dissemination (i.e., unlimited distribution) in any form
| (e.g., not necessarily in published form), including posting on the
| Internet on sites available to the public; or

I would also prefer that, but then i think it would be fair to come up
with a working plan for how all those SDOs could finance themselves
without monetizing dissemination of their publications. And
unfortunately its not as if we could really recommend the IETF model to
other SDOs. Its luckily still working for us (hoping), but i can see a lot of
reasons why it wouldn't work for others.

Cheer
    Toerless

> --
> Michael Richardson <[e-mail]>, Sandelman Software Works
>  -= IPv6 IoT consulting =-