Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 00:02:00 -0700
From: Joe Touch <touch(_at_)ISI(_dot_)EDU>
Subject: Re: An Internet Draft as reference material
[...]
From RFC 2026, Section 10.3.1. All Contributions:
l. ... However, to the extent that the submission is or may
be subject to copyright, the contributor, the organization he
represents (if any) and the owners of any proprietary rights in
the contribution, grant an unlimited perpetual, non-exclusive,
royalty-free, world-wide right and license to the ISOC and the
IETF under any copyrights in the contribution. This license
includes the right to copy, publish and distribute the
contribution in any way, and to prepare derivative works that are
based on or incorporate all or part of the contribution, the
license to such derivative works to be of the same scope as the
license of the original contribution.
[...]
Reading along further in the same document:
... Internet Drafts that
have been removed (for any reason) from the Internet-Drafts
directories shall be archived by the IETF Secretariat for the sole
purpose of preserving an historical record of Internet standards
activity and thus are not retrievable except in special
circumstances.
It isn't so clear that the rights in Sec 10.3.1 supercede the
implicit agreement in Sec. 8.
It's pretty clear to me that Section 10 specifies the intellectual
property rights that the author of a submission grants to the ISOC,
while Section 8 describes internal IETF procedures. It's also pretty
clear to me that under Section 10 the author grants fairly broad
perpetual rights to the ISOC, and that this grant of rights is not
contingent upon the IETF promising to never change its internal
procedures.
What you appear to me to want is the right for authors to limit or
retract the [perpeual] rights granted to the ISOC under Section 10
after the fact for pretty much any reason, including changes in
internal IETF procedures.
I do not believe that the ability of authors to impose restrictions on
their grant of rights to the ISOC after the fact is in the best interest
of the IETF. I also see no basis in RFC 2026 for such a claim.
I don't understand what your objectives are, but it seems possible that
the Internet Draft mechanism is not the most appropriate tool for that
task.
-tjs