Copyright does not protect ideas, just expression of these ideas. Thus,
anybody can take the ideas expressed in an I-D, expired or not, wrong or
not, and use them in any way he or she pleases, whether the author
appreciates this or not. (With the exception of patents, but they only
restrict implementation of the ideas, not writing about them or using
them otherwise in public discourse.) There is no way to prevent this,
nor it is immoral or illegal. Once something has been "said" in public,
the ideas are fair game, forever. The author can't say "I'm sorry, I
didn't meant to say this". Obviously, a conscientious author will try to
find out whether this is the last word of the author, but there's
nothing wrong with saying "In 1996 [17], John Doe claimed that the earth
was flat; he later changed his mind [18] to indicate that it was a
cylinder."
If Internet drafts disappear, the conscientious author is in a quandary:
he cannot give credit to the ideas in a way which is traceable by the
reader. Thus, the reader cannot easily check whether the author
misrepresented the ideas, for example. Thus, removing I-Ds makes
plagiarism and misrepresentation ("I vaguely recall John Doe saying this
in some I-D, but I have no easy way of checking this.") more, not less,
likely.
(As in Merriam Webster: plagiarism
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
: use (another's production) without crediting
the source
intransitive senses : to commit literary theft :
present as new and original an idea or
product derived from an existing source)
Thus, plagiarism is *not* using the 8+8 draft, but having no good way to
refer to the original source.
Also, in many cases, it is important to indicate when the idea
originated, not just for patent disputes. In other areas, workshop and
conference proceedings provide some record that preceeds archival
journals, and archival journals generally also indicate when the paper
was submitted. Even with an RFC, I have no way to tell whether the idea
that was published as an RFC in 2000 was novel when it first appeared in
an Internet draft many years earlier.
I've never seen a copyright statement that limits the use of the ideas.
This seems very foreign to the concept of free scholarly exchange and
the notion of copyright. (As far as I understand it, copyright protects
the financial interests of the author, his intellectual claims of
ownership and distortion of the ideas, but does not protect authors from
embarrassment.)
The analogy of comparing I-Ds to submission to journals does not hold.
Journal and conference submissions are treated as confidential by all
parties; there is no notion of anything resembling public access. All
reviewers agree that this is not to be distributed, etc. Claiming that
this applies to things kept in hundreds of copies for free access is a
stretch, to say the least, and has, as far as I can tell, no analogue in
any other area of publishing or copyright.
Also, standard fair use doctrine says that anybody can, without the
author's permission, quote pieces of the copyrighted work if it is for
criticism or other scholarly pursuits. Fair use does not include,
obviously, republishing the whole I-D.
There is another aspect which I think has been ignored in this whole
exchange: some fraction of I-D authors either don't care whether I-Ds
are kept forever or would actually prefer this, for example because it's
a lot easier to say to plagiarists or companies patenting one's ideas
"you should have looked at the IETF web site under 'old drafts'". Saying
"if you knew the title of the I-D and could sift through tens of
thousands of entries in google containing the word MPLS and light bulb,
you could have found this in some dusty forgotten archive somewhere" is
far less convincing.
Maybe it would help if the I-D boilerplate could be enhanced to state
what "expires" means explicitly, giving authors a choice as to whether
public archival is intended or not. The notion that documents made
available to thousands have an expiration date that restricts
publication after that is, as far as I can tell, a concept not found
anywhere else.
Henning
--
Henning Schulzrinne http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs