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RE: IPR Questions Raised by Sam Hartman at the IETF 73 Plenary

2008-12-18 07:17:57
On Thu Dec 18 11:08:09 2008, John C Klensin wrote:
To answer a slightly different question, but one that may be
more useful, the IETF was propelled along the path of specific
policies, with the original ones clearly recognizing the
"installed base", because of credible threats to block work
unless everything were rewritten from scratch to (at least)
remove all of the author's sentences.  The situation I remember
best involved work built on the author's text, but the WG
consensus differed from the author's concepts in some ways he
considered fundamental.   I don't recall the details, but I
believe that the threats extended at least into cease and desist
letters, not just the usual profile of posturing, noise, and
idle threats.

It could well be that I'm misunderstanding, but that kind of situation would surely fall into "derogatory treatment", ie, the stuff covered by Article 6bis of the Berne convention, or, for UK people, the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 80-83. In Berne language:

the author shall have the right to claim authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the said work, which would be prejudicial
        to his honor or reputation.

And this sounds like, basically, what happened, at least from the perspective of the contributor. Note that moral rights are often not transferrable in various jurisdictions, and certainly aren't automatically transferred anywhere as far as I know - section 11bis seems to prevent that.

Since these are moral rights, and not copyrights, and they're not mentioned at all by RFC 5378, surely the situation is entirely unchanged by this?

To put it another way, if the intent here was to avoid a repeat of this incident, then what's needed here is a waiver of moral rights, rather than a license of copyrights, which is beyond my ability to figure out. (I am, incidentally, not a lawyer, for those living in jurisdictions which like to have that in writing somewhere).

As another point, by submitting a document as author, I take it I am making the claim that all rights required under RFC 5378 are granted by all contributors, their employers, or estates, as appropriate - does this open me to litigation should a contributor I didn't know about complains? What if someone else submits the document, am I still liable? Where is the record of who submitted the document if not? (Presumably, once the document passes through AUTH48, I must be liable, having given explicit assent to it).

To put this another way, is contributing a revised document to the IETF now too risky an action to contemplate?

Dave.
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