On Wed, Sep 27, 2000 at 08:57:14PM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
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.
I agree that anyone who expects an I-D to completely disappear is naive.
It seems to me that you are simply discussing the meaning of the term
"expires". The straightforward meaning of the term is "no longer
available in the I-D directory". Having removed it from the I-D
directory, I would argue, the IETF has discharged it's obligation to
comply with any implied agreement to "expire" the drafts. The IETF has
faithfully upheld its end of that bargin.
We are now left with the issue of the legal status of the mass of
archived expired drafts. This is an archive that could, in principle,
have been kept by anyone, not just the IETF: During it's 6 months, every
draft was published to the world, for the world to study, and anyone in
the world could have archived it during that 6 months.
Questions for lawyers:
Is the legal status of the IETF materially different from a third-party
archiver, concerning making the archive available to the public? [eg, if
a search engine keeps cached copies of pages referring to I-Ds, and
those cached copies persist long after the I-D expires, is the search
site liable for some kind of copyright infringement?]
If there is some legal exposure, can it be mitigated by providing a
mechanism by which I-D authors of old drafts can elect to keep their
IDs more private?
One final note -- I thought the analogy with WG emails was useful --
that is, that expired drafts should be about as easy to search as the
email archives for a WG. But I think that would happen almost
automatically -- the archive is not going to be easy to search unless
significant indexing and organizational work is done up front -- and
the effort is actively maintained.
The use of IDs for demonstration of prior art raises an interesting
possibility: forged or altered IDs being used to challenge patents.
That's another reason to have a definitive archive available.
--
Kent Crispin "Do good, and you'll be
kent(_at_)songbird(_dot_)com lonesome." -- Mark Twain