Subject: RE: Copyright issues and authors (was: Re: One copyright issue or Two?)

From: "Powers Chuck-RXCP20" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2005 15:56:43 -0600

John,

   I happen to agree with you, and believe all my arguments have
attempted to point in that general direction, although maybe not as
succcinctly - perhaps they got lost somewhat in the shuffle. If you have
somehow perceieved that I am arguing the "other extreme" then I have
failed completely in making my case. IMO when I contribute to the
development of a standard, it is for that purpose, and not for someone
else to take and do what they want with it.

   Now, I think there are issues regarding "code" in an IETF RFC which
must be implemented in software that must be addressed, but for the
normative text, it should be limited to use by the IETF process, for
reprinting as a part of complete IETF documents, and nothing else. At
least, that's my opinion.

   In any case, thanks.

regards,

Chuck

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John C Klensin [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2005 7:03 PM
> To: Simon Josefsson; Powers Chuck-RXCP20
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: Copyright issues and authors (was: Re: One copyright 
> issue or Two?)
> 
> 
> Simon, Chuck, and others,
> 
> While I applaud your efforts to try to come up with exactly 
> the right text here, from my perspective some of the point 
> may be getting lost in the discussion.
> 
> I want to note that I've contributed more RFCs, both 
> standards track and informational, to the IETF than both of 
> you combined, and made major contributions to several more on 
> which my name does not appear except occasionally in 
> Acknowledgements.  That doesn't give my views any special 
> standing, but I feel a need to stress that I have 
> considerable skin in this game -- I'm not just theorizing or 
> arguing on behalf of some communities of standards-users of 
> unknown size, in some cases communities who appear to be 
> uncommonly inflexible.  At various times, I've done that work 
> while working in a research position for a university, for a 
> couple of different corporations, for a UN-component agency, 
> and while self-employed.  That collection of organizations 
> run the full spectrum of attitudes toward their rights in IPR 
> that was developed on their funds from "very relaxed" to 
> "extremely protective".
> 
> As I've noted before, I've also worked in standards bodies 
> (and continue to do so) in which the price of admission is 
> either any agreement that any contribution is a work for hire 
> by the standards body itself or agreement to explicitly sign 
> over all copyrights and any associated rights as a condition 
> of approval and publication.  More on that below.
> 
> The following comments are very personal ones.  I am probably 
> far more conservative and protective about this than most of 
> the community.  But I believe that we have been hearing a 
> little too much from the other extreme, so the conservative- 
> traditional- protective needs to be clearly on the table.
> 
> The long-term position of the IETF and its predecessors has 
> been that, if my name appears at the top of a document, it is 
> _mine_. I release to the IETF precisely those rights, and 
> only those rights, necessary to permit unlimited distribution 
> of an intact document and to permit the IETF to use the 
> document in conjunction with the standards process.  Period.  
> Full stop.  I am willing to give the IETF (presumably via the 
> IESG and/or
> IAOC) considerable latitude to interpret what is necessary 
> "in conjunction with the standards process" as long as they 
> have a set of principles about the decisions that are to be made and
> that the are applied consistently.   
> 
> Our efforts to express that position precisely in IPR 
> language have never been very successful, IMO, but that is 
> really a separate issue. 
> 
> With regard to I-Ds and anything else not formally published 
> (e.g., by the RFC Editor), I have an even stronger position: 
> I take "expires after six months" very seriously.  While I 
> have never exercised it, and probably never will, I consider 
> the right to insist that an I-D older than six months old be 
> taken off servers and repositories to be very important.  I 
> am willing to make anything I say on an IETF-related mailing 
> list available for use by the IETF in the standards process, 
> but for no other purpose.  I believe that taking those rights 
> away from me would have a chilling effect on my ability and 
> willingness to explore ideas that might never go anywhere.  
> More important, if there are others like me, I would expect 
> that removing those rights would push the IETF away from a 
> "most real work gets done on mailing lists" model and toward 
> a model in which everything important happens in face to face 
> meetings.
> 
> There are many reasons for that collection of attitudes, but 
> the key one is that my name is on top of the document.  If 
> someone pulls text out of one of my documents without 
> attribution and for a non-IETF purpose, they cause me harm.  
> How much harm is a matter between me and them, not a 
> three-way situation in which the IETF is involved.  
> Conversely, if something is extracted and attributed to me 
> (even by properly citing an RFC), but reflects opinions I 
> don't hold or is used in a context which I'm not happy about, 
> that also harms me.
> 
> Bluntly, if some organization wants to slice and dice an RFC 
> for its own purposes, disclaimers or prohibitions on using 
> some text are not, under the current model, going to be 
> sufficient.  They need to deal with the author(s) not the 
> IESG or a blanket license.  If an author wants to give 
> blanket extraction and derived works rights, I think it would 
> be good for the IETF to have a standard way to do that and to 
> be able to specify what IETF-related words cannot be included 
> (and I would strongly encourage looking at Creative Commons 
> models, rather than software licensing ones, for 
> inspiration).  But the author needs to be able to say "no" or 
> even impose selective conditions (including potential 
> royalties or other charges) or the current model falls apart. 
>  And I think all of us need to understand what is really at 
> stake here:  copyright has never protected ideas, only 
> particular expressions of those ideas.  If rights to extract 
> and derive --beyond those needed to apply the standard-- are 
> not granted to particular software developers, then those 
> software developers simply need to invest the resources to
> develop their own documentation as needed.    The IETF should
> not be in the business of guaranteeing a subsidy, one that 
> offsets some documentation costs, to a particular fraction of 
> the developer community, open source or otherwise.
> 
> I'm not going to give up those rights in previous documents.  
> If the IETF insists that I give them up in future documents 
> without any other changes in the way things are done, I may 
> vote with my feet.  Brian has suggested that, beyond a 
> certain threshold, insisting that companies that are 
> IPR-sensitive sign over more rights than they think necessary 
> would cause those companies to drop out and forbid 
> participation by their employees.  Whether the number of 
> them, added to the number of people whose reactions are 
> similar to mine, would be significant to the IETF is anyone's 
> guess.  But the IETF would be ill-advised to drive away too 
> many of the people who are are actually doing the work in 
> addition to or instead of hair-splitting over IPR.
> 
> Now, as I have pointed out before, there is an alternative to 
> this, which is to insist on transferring all rights to the 
> IETF and then let the IETF grant rights to others, including the
> author(s).  I floated that as a possibility a few weeks ago.   I
> didn't mention the second element that the standards bodies 
> that insist on doing things that way usually apply, which is 
> to publish their standards without authorship attribution: 
> there are no names at the top of the page and, depending on 
> the standards body and their conventions that year, it may be 
> reasonably hard to figure out who the editor actually was.  
> They really do go together: the author(s) and editor(s) give 
> up all rights and the standards body presents the document as 
> a group/aggregate work with no one person having any special 
> responsibility (or credit or blame).  I believe I got one 
> positive response and many negative ones to that crude 
> proposal. Frankly, that was the outcome I had hoped for: I 
> think the current model is one of the things that makes the IETF both
> unusual and effective.   Were we to make that shift, it would
> undoubtedly cost us some contributors too: the motivations 
> for doing work around here vary and I don't think anyone 
> understands all of them.
> 
> So, if you are ready to propose to change the system 
> entirely, please make that proposal, preferably in I-D form, 
> and let's discuss it... with the understanding that such a 
> proposal would
> have impacts far outside the scope of this WG.   If you are not,
> I suggest that you had best concentrate at least as much on 
> what those who are willing to contribute time as authors and 
> editors and, where relevant, the organizations who support 
> them are willing to give the IETF, and for what purposes, as 
> on what you think the IETF should give away.
> 
> regards,
>    john
> 
> 
> 
> 

_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg