Subject: Reminder: Some people do not want their input to be widely distributed

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 16:55:56 -0800

Just a reminder....

Brian Carpenter took away from the IPR WG meeting a task to get someone to 
explain in a coherent fashion why some companies would react to the IETF 
saying "anyone can copy and modify anything" by telling their engineers not 
to provide input to the IETF.
Or that's what I understood from his remarks at the close of IPR.

We haven't heard that argument yet.

                  Harald
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---

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2005 10:20:58 +0100

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]> writes:

> Just a reminder....
>
> Brian Carpenter took away from the IPR WG meeting a task to get
> someone to explain in a coherent fashion why some companies would
> react to the IETF saying "anyone can copy and modify anything" by
> telling their engineers not to provide input to the IETF.

I'm having trouble combining the subject line with the body of your
e-mail.

As per the subject, if someone doesn't want their input to be widely
distributed, I believe they should not submit their input to the IETF.
RFCs has been widely distributed since day one.

Further, the RFC 2026 license permit derivative works under a "field
of use" permission.  So under the 2026 license, people have had the
right to make modifications and distribute the derived work.  This
hasn't prevented many companies from participating.

Thanks,
Simon

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:22:34 +0100

Well, let me try.

We have a few cases of the following nature

- RFC authors objecting to third parties using their material in books
- Companies objecting to former employees re-using material published
   while they were employees
- Drafts submitted with the Derivative Works Limitation or
   Publication Limitation clauses from BCP 78.

which shows that in practice, less than 100% of contributors would
automatically support a copyleft license. To me, that suggests
we are always going to need an opt-out. I suspect that if we have
a default copyleft, the fraction of contributors choosing to opt out
would increase, because IPR lawyers tend to dislike blanket grants.

This isn't a show-stopper but it might be an unintended consequence.

There are also authors who require documents to be removed from the various
public archives of expired drafts. I've never been quite sure why, but
it happens.

     Brian

---

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2005 14:57:04 +0100

>   while they were employees

That appear to be a problem even with Scott Bradner's proposal.  The
authors or companies would not be able to stop that from happening.
The IETF will be granted a right to grant sub-licenses to the RFC.

The consensus of the WG in Vancouver was pretty overwhelming here.
The IETF need to have full rights to IETF contributions.

>   Publication Limitation clauses from BCP 78.

Any document published under that restricted license will most likely
not be used or implemented by the free software community.

However, I think this is a pretty marginal case.  I think we could
ignore this example for our current discussion.  It will have to be
discussed eventually.

> automatically support a copyleft license.

If your cases are valid, less than 100% of contributors would not
support Scott's proposal.  I believe they are in a minority.

> To me, that suggests we are always going to need an opt-out. I
> suspect that if we have a default copyleft, the fraction of
> contributors choosing to opt out would increase, because IPR lawyers
> tend to dislike blanket grants.
>

Agreed.

> public archives of expired drafts. I've never been quite sure why, but

Understand why authors demand this would be useful information for
this discussion.  It is difficult to craft license text to permit that
if we don't know why people want it.  Perhaps their reasons are things
we disagree with.

Thanks,
Simon

---

From: "todd glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2005 04:46:49 -0800

Simon (Harald correct me if I am mis-speaking here please)
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Simon Josefsson" <[email-masked]>
To: "Harald Tveit Alvestrand" <[email-masked]>
Cc: <[email-masked]>
Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2005 1:20 AM
Subject: Re: Reminder: Some people do not want their input to be
widelydistributed

> > telling their engineers not to provide input to the IETF.

OpenSource and all of the GPL licenses to some extent clearly recognize
privatized instances of those protocols and that is what is threatened by
this commentary. If there is no control such that anyone can copy and modify
anything, then the IETF has no responsibility of, or capability to protect
and defend its own and IP it holds in trust because it just gave them away.

As to what widely-distributed meant really I think, is that some people dont
want their IP controls rights to some or anything weakend, and such a
blanket walking away from its (the IETF's)  rights would do this.