On 25 mei 2010, at 20:17, todd glassey wrote:
The IETF does NOT own the underlying license rights to TCP/IP in ANY WAY.
For the record TCP/IP actually probably still belongs to the US
Government as it was originally produced under a Department of Defense
contract with BB&N about 40 years ago and nothing about its ownership
has ever been handed over to anyone that I know of.
Interestingly, RFC 793 doesn't appear to have any copyright claims. I'm not
sure when it stopped being necessary to have one of those in order to be
granted copyright in the US.
I'm not sure though how many rights one can hold to a protocol separately from
the copyright on the specification. Obviously independent implementations don't
violate any copyrights, and I'd be surprised if there were trademarks or
patents on TCP. If those ever existed, the trademark obviously wasn't defended
and the patents have expired.
(BTW TCP, IP and family are from ~ 1981, postdating the original ARPANET NCP
protocol by a decade.)
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