Joe Touch wrote:
Lawrence Conroy wrote:
It is VERY useful to be able to search through drafts to see how we
got here, AND to see things that were explored and abandoned.
Thieves find it very useful to have what they steal. That doesn't
legitimize their theft.
Utility can determine whether it's worth the effort/expense to run a
public archive, but your utility never undermines my rights as an author.
You're still seriously confusing things.
An I-D contribution transfers perpetual (i.e. irrevocable) redistribution
rights to the IETF -- at a minimum since rfc2026 (Oct 1996) and
1id-guidelines.txt pointing to rfc2026 section 10. For copyrighted
contents, the perpetual, irrevocable transfer of specific rights is
actually the norm, and an extraordinary, time-limited lease of rights
would have to be negotiated and mutually agreed to in order to apply.
(in German legalese the term is "Erschöpfungsgrundsatz").
The management of the online I-D repository and the expiration of
documents in there has NOTHING whatsoever to do with that transfer
of rights.
Surely an author can decide to re-publish the I-D contents under
different licenses somewhere else or later. But that does not
impair the rights previously granted to the IETF in any way.
What is necessary, however, for the transfer of rights according to
rfc2026 section 10 to have happened, is that the I-D submitter was
in posession of (or entitled to) grant/transfer these rights.
Only when the I-D submitter did not have that rights when he submitted
the document, would require the IETF to stop re-distribution the I-D
when it became aware of this (and found itself unable to retroactively
obtain the necessary rights from the rightful owner).
-Martin