On May 27, 2010, at 7:06 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
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.
http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm
"Under the 1909 Act, works published without notice went into the
public domain upon publication. Works published without notice between
1-1-78 and 3-1-89, effective date of the Berne Convention
Implementation Act, retained copyright only if efforts to correct the
accidental omission of notice was made within five years, such as by
placing notice on unsold copies."
As RFC 793 was published in September 1981, I would assume (but I am
not a lawyer) that RFC793 is in the public domain.
Regards
Marshall
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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