On Sep 20, 2012, at 18:49, John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote:
I personally don't consider it very likely that someone would
actually sue or convince some appropriate prosecutor to come
after us. But, however one assesses the likelihood of that
happening and of that party winning, I think an attitude of
"don't worry about it until that happens and we lose" would
represent severely bad judgment.
It may be news for many people, but we all do things all day that might be
considered illegal by someone.
(The image of a "law-abiding citizen" is mostly romantics.)
The question is whether there is an actual risk involved.
When there isn't, and people still press the point, we call that a red herring.
There is always a non-zero risk that some of our actions could by some
jurisdiction maybe considered illegal.
Whether that likelihood (and the potential damage) is bearable or not, is
indeed a matter of judgement.
Lawyers engage in assessing such a risk, and it is then usually a business (or
personal life) decision whether you take the risk.
In this specific case, however, let me just opine that anybody who sees a
serious risk here doesn't seem to get out much otherwise.
Perhaps more important from my point of view, [...]
Now those are the interesting questions, indeed.
Let's focus on what is useful, and what is right (not what can be considered
legal or illegal using some contrived amateur lawyer thinking).
The reality is that there is no harm coming to a submitter from the fact that
the IETF is the 1001st place where expired drafts can be had.
There simply is no downside to the IETF also archiving them and making the
archive available for our purposes.
The upside of doing this is that we maintain control, and that we can have
tools operate on that archive that are useful to our work.
That is the right thing to do.
Now the one single thing that irks me, but I don't know how to solve:
We just had a consensus call in one WG on adopting a draft that at this time
had been expired for a year.
The chairs didn't notice, because the URI was stable (as it should be).
Grüße, Carsten