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Re: Editors vs Authors vs Contributors, was: ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

2009-01-23 16:56:48
Simon,

My recollection, without doing an archive search, is that our counsel
took the opposite view, i.e. that the parenthesis expanded the scope
beyond "ISOC and the IETF". IANAL and YMMV.

    Brian

On 2009-01-23 23:20, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Brian E Carpenter <brian(_dot_)e(_dot_)carpenter(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> writes:

Ted,

On 2009-01-23 10:30, Theodore Tso wrote:
...
Ultimately, I suspect the list of contributors is a good and polite
thing to do out of courtesy, but it's not all that useful from an IPR
point of view.  Even if there was code that you wanted to use from a
pre-RFC5378 text, you wouldn't need or want to contact *all* the
contributors; you would want to know who contributed the portion of
the RFC containing the code that you wanted to use in an
implementation (either proprietary or open source).
To be clear about the case of code: the right to use code was already
granted under the old rules; it's the right to use non-code text in
non-IETF derivative works that is made possible by the new rules.

RFC3978 and RFC3667 include:
      "(E) to extract, copy, publish, display, distribute, modify and
          incorporate into other works, for any purpose (and not limited
          to use within the IETF Standards Process) any executable code
          or code fragments that are included in any IETF Document..."

Those right are not granted to "third parties", only to the ISOC/IETF.
The section before the paragraph you quote from RFC 3978 begins with:

   a. To the extent that a Contribution or any portion thereof is
      protected by copyright and other rights of authorship, the
      Contributor, and each named co-Contributor, and the organization
      he or she represents or is sponsored by (if any) grant a
      perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide
      right and license to the ISOC and the IETF under all intellectual
                --------------------------------
      property rights in the Contribution:

So I disagree that the right to use code was already granted under RFC
3978.  In fact, I believe this was one of the main flaws with RFC 3978.

/Simon

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