Speaking as an individual, IANAL, etc., a few general comments...
First, overall, the issues John raises are real and need to be
addressed, IMO.
Second, I know of cases (while I was AD) where a WG participant owned
the copyright on an ID the WG had been discussing, and then balked at
making requested changes. In at least one case, a document was
rewritten in "clean room" fashion to get around potential problems. We
do not want to do these sorts of things. They are painful and
frustrating, they delay work, and they are a drain on precious cycles
that could better be spent doing other things.
Such scenarios may not happen often, but they can (and have)
happened. Some former IETF participants have walked away from the IETF
in a disgruntled fashion. In no way would it be acceptable for the
IETF as an organization to allow anyone to have the potential ability
to block IETF work by withholding any needed additional/new
rights. Yet, that is what RFC 5378 appears to do.
One of the "features" of the current IETF IPR (not copyright) policies
is that each individual WG decides on a case-by-case basis what to do
with IPR assertions. Those discussions are often messy,
non-terminating and contentious because there are unknowns (i.e.,
unquantifiable future risk), and the normal rules engineers follow
don't apply (e.g., the lawyers and licensing folk see issues very
differently than engineers do). Different people (and companies) see
the risks very differently. So what works for one individual won't
work for someone else.
Placing the responsibility on individual authors (and by implication
their employers) for getting necessary permissions to use text
contributions from others (e.g., when revising previous RFCs) is
problematic when such permissions can't easily be obtained because:
- it places unknown/hard to quantify future risk on the individual (who may
or may or may not care)
- by implication, it places future risk on their employer (who
probably very much will care)
One might hypothesize that some will say "this is silly" and just
continue to submit documents without worrying much. Others (like those
working for larger corporations) may well find that a general
corporate policy will not allow them to take such steps (legal
departments rarely issue blank checks for future unknown
risk). Consequently, all cases will likely be treated as exceptions to
be evaluated on individual merits and on a case-by-case basis. Anyone
who has had significant interactions with legal departments on such
matters will understand how problematic this would be in
practice. There would be a huge discincentive to authoring work of
this nature, and at best there would be (potentially lengthy)
delays. Most likely, the pool of available authors would simply
shrink. That would not be good for the IETF.
Thomas
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