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RE: IPR/Copyright

2009-03-27 09:25:35


--On Friday, March 27, 2009 06:31 +0300 Yaakov Stein
<yaakov_s(_at_)rad(_dot_)com> wrote:

I note that, if the community's preference is really the
second choice, then we are finished.  The Trustees would
presumably follow the general rough consensus on this list,
interpret the existing workaround as permanent, and  we would
all move on.

Well, almost finished.

If a draft using the workaround becomes RFC and someone wants
to reuse material from it, the latter work becomes a "second
derivative". So we will need to use the workaround for some
post-5398 RFCs as well. In fact, a recursive algorithm is
needed to determine whether or not to use the pre-5398
language.

I don't understand why you think a document that is built on one
that uses pre-5398 text but was published, say, this year with
the disclaimer is different from one that uses pre-5398 text but
was published in the middle of last year.  

Whatever we do, there will be documents for a very long time
that have roots in pre-5378 materials.  Whether those roots are
significant depends, presumably, on how much text was carried
forward not on how many times it was carried forward, so I don't
see a "second derivative" issue that is any different from the
first one.

The only way that anyone has suggested (other than completely
different legal theories) that would significantly change that
situation involves taking a position that, if a document
contains old material and the author cannot or will not take
responsibility for identifying all prior Contributors and
rights-holders and obtain permission from them, the document
cannot be posted.  That is essentially the position 5378 takes.
I believe the community has concluded that would be fairly
destructive to getting anything done in the IETF, to the point
that almost all discussions since November have been about how
hard to push authors to try to explicitly obtain rights from
prior Contributors.  

However, as soon as  one accepts any exceptions at all to permit
publishing documents containing Contributions for which rights
cannot be obtained, we need to accept that there will be new
documents published with whatever disclaimer or exception text
is used for a _very_ long time.

That is not an ideal situation, but it appears to me to be a
straight tradeoff between giving priority to the standards
process and giving priority to a completely clean IPR/copyright
arrangement that is really important only in a small number of
cases.  

The first choice seems more appropriate to me... and it leaves
us without the need for more IPR process, documents, WGs, etc.

    john

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