FWIW, the Trust doesn't actually own copyright to any of the templates
within RFCs. At most, the Trust owns copyright to the RFC end-product,
as produced by the RFC editor, and can control republication as an RFC
(or similar compilations) with permission from the individual copyright
owners.
And it certainly isn't necessary to provide permission to fill-in a
template, since the document itself is telling you to fill-in the
template and reproduce it for the purpose of submission. Hence,
that permission is implied by the author(s), one of which (or their
employer) is probably the true copyright owner of the template text.
And even if the Trust did own copyright to the template and chose to
forbid changes to that template, such copyright would not extend
to a software form that merely reflects the same or similar structure,
names, and purpose, even if it submitted incorrect fields to some
IANA address; none of those things are allowed to be copyrightable.
Patentable, perhaps, but not copyrightable.
And, for crying out loud, IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO PROVIDE LICENSING
TEXT WITHIN THE RFC INTRODUCTION! You can do that as a general policy
for the IETF as a whole, within any webpage on the IETF website, and
it is just as legally valid notification of *permission* as pasting it
within a few thousand standards documents. The only time that notices
might need to be pasted all over the place is when you are taking a
permission away that the recipient might otherwise expect to have,
and even then the only difference the notice makes is that it might
be easier for you to sue for damages.
In short, WTF? The Trustees should know enough about basic
intellectual property law and the purpose of the IETF to avoid
this kind of ritualistic insanity.
....Roy