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Re: Flaw in the NOTEWell System makes NOTEWELL NOTWELL

2006-07-25 16:32:49


On Tuesday, July 25, 2006 03:44:21 PM -0700 todd glassey <tglassey(_at_)earthlink(_dot_)net> wrote:

Hi there Audit Fans - Lets look at NoteWell and figure out how it
interacts with Corporate Governance and Compliance Policies...

First of all, you keep using the word "NOTEWELL" as if it is the name of something. Perhaps a policy, or a system, or a process, or a body of documents, or ... I don't know. But the IETF has no process or body of material which it calls "NOTEWELL" or "NoteWell" or anything like that.

The admonition "Note Well" appears above a one-page notice which is distributed to all participants at IETF meetings, published on the IETF web site, and so on. That page reminds people that the IETF has certain rules requiring contributions made to its process and the responsibilities of people making those contributions, and that anything you say in places like an IETF meeting or mailing list is subject to those rules.


    2) The IETF however claims that any Email sent to it in any form
constitutes NOTEWELL and becomes its property. The problem is that it has
no agreements with the other email provider to make that true.

As I explained above, there is no body of documents or process or whatever called "NOTEWELL", so there is nothing that "constitutes NOTEWELL". I think the phrase you are looking for here is "is subject to the terms of BCP 78 and BCP 79".

The IETF does not claim that any email or other contributions sent to it become its property. In fact, IETF contributions remain the property of the contributor, with the IETF gaining only certain non-exclusive rights which it needs in order to carry out its mission. For someone who contributes material that belongs to his employer, it is up to him to insure he is authorized to do so, just as it is up to him to make sure the material he wants to contribute is not confidential before posting it to a public mailing list.

Interestingly, many other SDO's do _not_ work this way. Their members are typically companies, not individuals, and those members are required to pay a fee and sign a contract, one of whose terms is that any contributions made to the standards process are "works for hire", belonging to the SDO.



So who actually owns the IP?

Whoever owned it to begin with.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu>
  Sr. Research Systems Programmer
  School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
  Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA


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