Subject: IESG Response to Copyright appeal

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2001 18:05:23 -0400

Included here is the message previously sent to Rnbert Elz in response
to the appeal he raised.

KRE:

You sent an appeal to the IESG. In that you complained that an internet 
draft that you posted was not being handled according to your wishes. Your 
wishes, as stated in other email, are that you wish to retain no 
intellectual property whatsoever in the draft, and contribute that set of 
ideas as a gift to the world. That is an admirable wish. You also wish that 
nobody else, including ISOC, hold any more rights with regard to your text 
than you do. We understand where your are going, but it has serious legal 
problems.

The IETF, like you, desires to make specifications and other documents 
publicly available to all, available for use for any purpose. We do have 
one concern, which I believe that you also have - we do not believe that 
someone should be able to start from text such as an RFC, modify it to say 
something that it does not, and claim that it is our text. Your proposed 
approach is to abandon any and all copyright. According to legal counsel 
that we have received, under the Berne Treaty, you cannot actually do that 
- you retain certain rights whether or not you choose to exercise them, 
which include the possibility of re-asserting copyright at some point
in the future. Hence, simply abandoning your rights does not protect the 
document from you or anyone else. RFC 2026's approach is to have the RFC 
author specifically state that he or she is granting the ISOC the right to 
publish the text and no more, and the ISOC copyright statement in turn 
protects the document from being changed and republished as if it were the 
real thing. Whatever the faults of that mechanism may be, it actually 
addresses your concern as well as our lawyer believes is possible under 
international law.

There are two issues remaining. One relates to dealing with Crown Copyright 
and similar laws relating to work done for hire by US Government employees; 
while the mechanisms differ, the effect is to make such work incompatible 
with the ISOC Copyright as stated. A proposal was made to Poisson about a 
year ago to deal with those issues, but the discussion has been hampered by 
amateur lawyering. To be perfectly honest, the current IESG position 
regarding boilerplate is a stopgap imposed to make an honest attempt to 
deal with the legal issues until Poisson agrees to a better one, but the 
amateur lawyering in Poisson has made that discussion close to impossible 
to bring to closure. In an attempt to deal with this, the IESG has tasked 
John Klensin and Scott Bradner to work with the IETF lawyer to provide 
proper legal text and a translation for mere mortals, to attempt to discuss 
further in Poisson. That will be ongoing.

The other issue is the document that you have posted to FTP Extensions. The 
legal counsel that we have been given indicates that the best way you can 
achieve your goal is to assert, in the draft boilerplate, that the document 
conforms to, or, the lawyer suggests, "is subject to", the provisions of 
RFC 2026 section 10. You may go further, if you wish, to immediately 
thereafter say

     "In addition, the authors (on behalf of themselves and their
     employers) hereby relinquish any claim to any copyright that they
     may have in this work, whether granted under contract or by operation
     of law or international treaty, and hereby commit to the public, at
     large, that they shall not, at any time in the future, seek to enforce
     any copyright in this work against any person or entity, or prevent any
     person or entity from copying, publishing, distributing or creating
     derivative works of this work."

In doing this, you leave the ISOC copyright there, which asserts that the 
ISOC has your permission to publish the document in the RFC archive, and 
protects it from unauthorized modifications or claims. Doing so, according 
to our counsel '...is as close to a "contribution to the public" that we 
can get'.