From: Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
It's not merely that I-D's are already archived, albeit inconveniently
and obscurely.
yes, but IETF isn't (yet) maintaining public archives, so IETF doesn't
(yet) have the liability of breaking its agreement to expire the draft
after six months.
"expectation", yes. But "agreement"? Written where?
I agree that anyone who expects an I-D to completely disappear is naive.
But the real issues here are IETF's legal liability and loss of faith.
"loss of faith"?--perhaps.
"legal liability"?--to which bar are you admitted so that you can say
whether the current boilerplate imposes any such liability on the IETF?
Essentially all I-D's that are submitted with the
expectation something very similar to their contents will become an RFC.
statistics by themselves would make that a fairly naive expectation.
but it is not really relevant.
I'm not a lawyer, but that observation sounds like an excellent defense
against legal claims of I-D authors unhappy about a new IETF I-D archive.
there are folks who are quite
willing for IETF to publish their documents as RFCs if they are approved,
but would prefer that their documents not be archived if they are not
approved. it's sort of a "either give my document the respect it
deserves or you can't have it at all" mentality. and the author clearly
has the right to do that. (though since the days of required boilerplate,
perhaps only if he limits IETF's rights to publish as an Internet-Draft).
That expectation might be common, although it says bad things about the
IETF. Do you honestly think that before the boilerplate that any such
legal liability existed and that courts would not be more likely than not
to laugh at an I-D author with such a complaint?
The only "right" of an I-D author that might be violated by the IETF
keeping a copy of an I-D as an I-D instead of as an RFC is the "right" to
not look like a fool or not have the world know what fraction of the
author's ideas are bad or unpopular.
are you willing to accept IETF's liability should a court decide otherwise?
That's an offensive statement because we all know that regardless of the
merits of any suit, there is always a non-zero probability of the wrong
verdict. Only very deep pockets can accept such liabilities.
Let's turn it around. Are you willing to accept the legal and criminal
liabilities for the legal advice you are giving? I'm not a lawyer, but
I've seen regular public comments by people claiming to be lawyers admitted
to at least one state bar saying that for non-lawyers to offer legal advice
is a crime in their state. Yes, the word they used was crime, and they
make clear they were not talking about of torts. The specific context is
a mailing list concerning TCPA actions against junk faxers, where the
lawyers frequently say they are not giving advice and warn the non-lawyer
participants against doing so.
Consider the many cases over the years where I-D's were accidentally not
deleted on time. Are you advising the relevant authors to contact the
ISOC's insurance company with offers to settle their claims against the
IETF?
sheesh!--let's try to keep this intellectually honest and not quite so silly.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com