Re: [Asrg] New Version Notification for draft-irtf-asrg-dnsbl-07

At 8:03 AM -0400 10/15/08, Daniel Feenberg  imposed structure on a 
stream of electrons, yielding:
> On Wed, 15 Oct 2008, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>
> > --On 14 October 2008 13:31:06 -0400 der Mouse 
> > <mouse(_at_)Rodents-Montreal(_dot_)ORG> wrote:
> > > > > Because of the importance of the Internet in general, I would
> > > > > suggest that RFCs include a legal considerations section for aiding
> > > > > lawmakers, where relevant.
> > > > I really don't think it's a good idea for us technonerds to be giving
> > > > legal advice.  Just think of the technical advice that lawyers would
> > > > give us, and then ask yourself why ours would be any better.
> > > Besides, which jurisdiction(s) would the legal considerations be for?
> > I guess the point would be to direct future legislation, rather 
> > than to try to reflect current legislation. But, I don't think that 
> > RFCs are a great place to lobby for legislation.
> In many jusrisdictions, and in many court cases, the judge will need 
> to establish the "customs of the trade". RFCs can be introduced to 
> help inform the judge of these customs. So an RFC can have legal 
> significance, even if it isn't legal advice, or law itself. We 
> wouldn't want the RFC to contain material that would mislead a judge 
> in such a situation.
> It isn't a matter of writing law that is valid for every country on 
> earth, but of correctly damping the expectations of spammers for 
> spam delivery, so that judges will understand that the spammer has 
> "no reasonable expectation" of delivery. Of course statutes can 
> override custom, but that is not the business of the RFC.
All true.

More broadly, over the past 15 years of casual observation I've seen 
about a dozen incidents of content being excluded from an 
RFC-in-development because it stood some chance of being perceived as 
legal advice or as an attempt to inject particular policy preferences 
into a "standard" that could be waved at judges or lawmakers. I'm far 
from an IETF "insider" but it has been my distinct impression that 
the norms in RFC development have long (and wisely) been averse to 
entanglement with law. This is particularly true of Standards Track 
RFC's, which frequently get everything not strictly technical carved 
off of them in development, sometimes to other types of RFC's.
Beyond that, it is clear to me that any grand plan to add a section 
to RFC's generally is far outside the scope of the ASRG or the IRTF. 
this would be something NOT to be advocated here in the narrow 
context of this one document, which is devised as a technical 
standard with a BCP companion covering related issues of consensus 
opinion rather than objective fact. A campaign to change the way 
RFC's coexist with legal systems would belong more at the ISOC layer 
than here.


--
Bill Cole                                  
bill(_at_)scconsult(_dot_)com
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