Lawrence Rosen allegedly wrote, On 12/13/08 2:04 PM:
The notion is not right, albeit that it is reflected in the current IETF IPR
policy, that a process can be in any way restricted from being improved
because someone planted a copyright notice on its essential description. An
description of a process, method of operation, etc., cannot be locked away
and prevented from amendment and improvement because of copyright. Allowing
that would subject our functional process specifications in IETF to 100-year
copyright monopolies even though there aren't even 20-year patent monopolies
that apply to that specification. Nobody owns those ideas or the essential
descriptions of those ideas; they are public domain.
You can improve any technology you want, modulo IPR -- that's not the
point here. The problem is taking existing copyrighted text and using
it as a base for describing your technology.
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