Subject: RE: One copyright issue or Two?

From: "Powers Chuck-RXCP20" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 15:03:52 -0600

Comments below

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Josefsson [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Friday, December 09, 2005 11:07 AM
> To: Powers Chuck-RXCP20
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: One copyright issue or Two?
> 
> 
> "Powers Chuck-RXCP20" <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> >> Free implementations quote the RFCs in several places.  I
> >> claim that removing all existing excerpts, and erasing the 
> >> long-standing tradition among developers to quote RFCs in 
> >> source code and manuals, is practically impossible.
> >> 
> >> Further, I don't understand what removing the excerpts, or
> >> the tradition, would contribute to.  These excerpts are a 
> >> good thing. That's why I propose that IETF should change its 
> >> copying conditions to align with reality.  I believe it is 
> >> the right thing to do.
> >
> > Allowing quotes from RFCs is not real the problem, as I see it.
> 
> Good.  Making sure quotes from RFC are usable in free 
> software is one of my goals.
> 
> > The real problem is that your proposal would allow folks to 
> take the 
> > normative text, edit it to say anything they want, and republish it.
> 
> That is false.
> 
> The intent of my license is to protect against that.
> 
> You can't continue to claim that in good faith without 
> explaining how my license fail to protect against this situation.

[Text from draft -03]

      c.   The Contributor grants third parties the irrevocable
           right to copy, use and distribute the Contribution, with
           or without modification, in any medium, without royalty,
           provided that unauthorized redistributed modified works
           do not contain misleading author, version, name of work,
           or endorsement information.  Unauthorized redistributed
           modified works must (a) not claim endorsement of the
           modified work by the IETF, IESG, IANA, IAB, ISOC, RFC
           Editor, or any similar organization, and (b) remove any
           claims of status as an Internet Standard, e.g., by
           removing the RFC boilerplate.  The IETF suggests that any
           citation or excerpt of unmodified text reference the RFC
           or other document from which the text is derived.

Not sure how this can be construed to "protect" against publishing
modified normative text - it would be horribly easy to publish edited
normative text which did not "contain misleading author, version, name
of work, or endorsement information" but which could still be implied to
be the actual text from the RFC. While one might not be able to publish
a complete, "fake" RFC, one would still be able to grab pieces of an
RFC, edit it and republish it without the unsuspecting reader being any
wiser to the fact. This is why I propose the use of a "warning label" -
telling folks they must say "this is not real" is much more effective
than just telling them "you can't say this is real."

> 
> To also require that a "warning label" is added may be fine, 
> but I don't want to add such text to the license unless you 
> would accept the final license.  I'd also like to hear from 
> others whether a "warning label" is a useful approach that 
> would increase acceptance for the license within the IETF.
> 
> I'm trying to understand whether you accept the notion that 
> quotes or extracts from RFCs should be permitted in free 
> software.  If so, that leads to granting rights to make 
> modifications to the quote, otherwise it will be incompatible 
> with free software licenses.

Here, you make my point above. You insist that the IETF grant
permissions compatible with free software licenses, which by definition
would allow someone to take the normative text, edit it to say anything
they want, and then republish it, with some rather minimal restrictions
regarding claiming it to be valid. By "say anything they want", I don't
mean they could specifically claim it is an RFC; I mean they could copy
and modify a part(s) of the normative text itself so that it had a
completely different meaning, publish it in their work, and still imply
through context that it was taken verbatim from the relevant RFC. I
believe that your proposal allows this, and therefore, my statement
above is in fact "True", not "False". Perhaps the confusion comes from
the fact that I am less worried about entire fake RFCs being published
than I am about it happening in pieces, which would make it much more
difficult to recognize.

Also note that we cannot limit our discussion to just what the original
"quoter" would do; we also have to look at future iterations. If you are
allowed to quote normative text from an RFC, and then pass that along
under a license which allows the next guy to edit it as they see fit,
the result would be the same as if you yourself changed the normative
text.

> 
> > This goes way beyond "quoting RFCs". In fact, I think there 
> would be 
> > little concern over allowing verbatim, and properly 
> referenced, quotes 
> > from RFCs used as reference material - as a contributor to an IETF 
> > RFC, I would be happy to see the results of my efforts quoted 
> > elsewhere.
> 
> Good.  RFC 3978 forbid that usage, I'm trying to fix it.
> 
> > Allowing the normative text to be freely modified, however, is IMO 
> > unnecessary, and as of yet no one has provided a valid 
> argument as to 
> > why such permissions should be given by the IETF outside of 
> > tightly-controlled situations, or how it would negatively 
> impact the 
> > open source community to not do so, particularly if verbatim quotes 
> > were allowed.
> 
> If quotes (or tables, or ASN.1 schemas, etc) from RFCs are 
> added to free software projects, the quote (or tables, etc) 
> must be modifiable in order for the resulting combined work 
> to be distributable under a free license.  This argument has 
> been given for many months, and nobody has challenged it.

As I said in previous emails, I believe that a way could be defined
which would indicate which portions of an RFC constituted "code" (e.g.
something that would either be included in, or referenced by, an
executable), and that those portions should be made available under an
IETF software license, which could/should be compatible with open
source. While making this happen would not be a trivial effort, I think
it is possible to accomplish.

> 
> If quotes from a RFC cannot be modified, it is not possible 
> to quote RFCs in free software.
> 
> Thanks,
> Simon
> 

regards,

Chuck

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---

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 13:19:21 +0100

>            or other document from which the text is derived.

Actually, that text is from -02.

> be the actual text from the RFC.

I don't see how anyone could claim that, it would be fraud.

Somebody could claim that the document contains text from the RFC.
That would be a correct claim, and even one that we should encourage,
to make readers aware of the original source.

> While one might not be able to publish a complete, "fake" RFC, one
> would still be able to grab pieces of an RFC, edit it and republish
> it without the unsuspecting reader being any wiser to the fact.

I don't see how.  The license in -03 require that you remove any
claims of status as an Internet standard and remove the RFC boiler
plate.

> This is why I propose the use of a "warning label" - telling folks
> they must say "this is not real" is much more effective than just
> telling them "you can't say this is real."

I'm still not convinced we need that, but I'm not entirely opposed to
it either, if it would be a workable path forward.

Would you accept wording along the lines of the following?

The reason I propose this instead of adopting your proposal is that
your text causes problems when incorporating portions of RFC in
implementation: in particular, adding one warning label for each RFC
that is quoted easily generate a huge amount of warning notes, which
become unreadable.  I don't think we want that situation.

   The Contributor grants third parties the irrevocable right to copy,
   use and distribute the Contribution, with or without modification,
   in any medium, without royalty, provided that, unless separate
   permission is granted, redistributed modified works:
...
  (d) clearly label a derivative work as such, to avoid similarity
      between the original work and the derivative work.

The first paragraph is from the re-worded text made after -03 was
submitted, the entire updated license is available from
<http://josefsson.org/bcp78broken/>.  I did not want to overload the
I-D editor by sending -04 only one day after sending -03.  If someone
feel we need to have the text in draft form to discuss the (d) text
further, I'll request for -04 to be published.  The updated text will
be part of what goes into -04 anyway.

> permissions compatible with free software licenses, which by definition
                                                            -------------
> regarding claiming it to be valid.

No, I think you misunderstand how compatibility work free software
licenses work here.

There is no requirement in GPL/BSD that derivative works of free
software must be permitted to be easily confused with the original
work, as far as I know.

I think that to require derivative works remove all traces of the RFC
boilerplate, the terms IETF etc, would be compatible with free
software licenses.  If that is done, I don't see how it would be
useful for someone to claim that the text is the original RFC.

I believe requiring to add a warning label would constitute a free
license too.  I have forwarded this to debian-legal and will forward
it to the FSF lawyers as well, if we intend to proceed with this path.

However, your initial suggested text need further tweaking, like
Florian pointed out.  Adding one warning notice for every RFC you
implement easily builds up to hundreds of warning labels in a manual.
I don't think that's useful.  If we can address your concern with
other text (which I believe), that will be better.

Even if the text is tweaked, I'm not sure it is a good idea.
Requiring notices to be present causes all sorts of problems, and may
have implications on whether the license is GPL_compatible.  The only
change between the original BSD license and the revised BSD license
was to remove the requirement to add acknowledgments.  The latter
license is GPL-compatible, the former is not.  See:

   http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

I believe that we not only have to pick a free license, it must also
be compatible with commonly used free licenses, such as the GPL and
the revised BSD license.  Those are (almost) orthogonal issues, a free
license can be GPL-incompatible (such as the original BSD license).

> By "say anything they want", I don't mean they could specifically
> claim it is an RFC; I mean they could copy and modify a part(s) of
> the normative text itself so that it had a completely different
> meaning, publish it in their work, and still imply through context
> that it was taken verbatim from the relevant RFC.

That seem true.  However, I'm not sure a warning notice would solve
that problem entirely anyway.  We shouldn't assume that everyone is
stupid.

> Perhaps the confusion comes from the fact that I am less worried
> about entire fake RFCs being published than I am about it happening
> in pieces, which would make it much more difficult to recognize.

Yes.  I now understand your concern better.

> the result would be the same as if you yourself changed the normative

Agreed.

> it is possible to accomplish.

I don't think this is a useful end result.  It doesn't solve
incorporating text from RFCs in technical manuals.  It doesn't solve
using RFCs in teaching material.  It doesn't solve the problem of
incorporating text in source code comments.

Regards,
Simon