Hi.
I agree with Sam and Scott. Let me add one more piece to that
picture:
We have spent many years saying not only "I-Ds expire" but "I-Ds
are not an archival series". While I've gradually come around
to the advantages of the IETF maintaining an archive of old ones
and making it accessible, I think there are many reasons for not
promising that. From the IETF's point of view, perhaps the most
important of those reasons is the seemingly-perennial argument
that we have about whether the existence of non-standards-track
RFCs is either misleading or provides an unnecessary avenue for
abuse by those who want to imply IETF approval when none exists.
We've seen the same games played with I-Ds, e.g., "post an I-D
and then advertise 'under consideration in the IETF" or even
"being standardized by the IETF".
I think the IESG should have the authority (and responsibility)
to remove I-Ds from the public archive, not just on the basis of
court orders and the like, but in response to any strong
evidence of abuse, without our having to try to enumerate all
categories of abuses in advance. I think that such a decision
should be announced so that it can be appealed if necessary, but
that, to avoid both general annoyance/noise and DoS attacks, we
not get trapped into considering taking down a document to be a
consensus matter. It is not an archival series and we should
not promise that it will be maintained as one.
If Counsel advises that we keep copies of anything that is taken
down so that, e.g., we can respond to court orders to produce or
authenticate it (at least unless a court of final jurisdiction
orders us to discard it), I'm find with that, but the draft
statement doesn't address the disposition of documents that are
removed from the web site at all.
I also believe that the IESG should reestablish policies that
permit WGs (or their leadership), ADs responsible for WG
documents, or submitters of individual or other-stream documents
to pre-expire them --i.e., have them moved from the I-D
directory and "active" status in the tracker. When such
documents were posted in error or are clearly at risk of
becoming a distraction, the community is not well-served by
insisting that they remain "active" until the six months runs
out.
To repeat, the I-D series was explicitly designed to not be
archival. Let's not change that by an overly restrictive
take-down policy.
john
p.s. FWIW, my understanding of the DCMA is consistent with Dave
Crocker's and his note on the subject. Andrian, as I understand
it, there is no such thing as a pre-emptive counternotice. If
the IETF, faced with a proper DCMA complaint, decided to not
take something down, the boilerplate might become part of a "his
problem, not ours" defense, but, as Dave suggests, that is the
sort of thing on which lawyers become wealthy. In practical
terms, unless we decide we have a liking for lawsuits, we'd
probably be much better off responding to a proper DCMA notice
by taking the I-D out of public view and then letting anyone who
believes that the draft should have stayed up sue the entity who
created the notice.
--On Tuesday, September 04, 2012 07:27 -0400 Scott O Bradner
<sob(_at_)sobco(_dot_)com> wrote:
in addition
since there is no admissions control on IDs I would think that
the IESG would want to reserve the option to remove an ID
that contained clear libel or inappropriate material (e.g., a
pornographic story published as an ID as part of a DoS attack
on the IETF) once the IESG had been given notice of such
material
Scott
On Sep 3, 2012, at 9:29 PM, Sam Hartman
<hartmans-ietf(_at_)mit(_dot_)edu> wrote:
I strongly urge the IESG to be significantly more liberal in
the cases where an I-D will be removed from the archive.
I can think of a number of cases where I'd hope that the IESg
would be cooperative: