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Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

2000-09-27 09:20:04


Tim Salo wrote:

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:

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.

Unlike standards in the IETF, this is not a matter for rough consensus.

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.

Let me be more explicit then. What I want is what the 
practice/agreement/contract (implicit or otherwise)
was when I submitted, for drafts submitted at that time.

Agreements, on whatever basis, cannot be changed
retroactively in the interest of enabling patent
searches _or_ for historic preservation.

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.

Whether it _IS_ not the most appropriate, doesn't change
whether it _WAS_. And neither does the unilateral retroactive
alteration of an agreement.

Joe