Subject: Question about Tax Liabilities and the IETF's document portfolio and its worth...

From: "todd glassey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 11:57:16 -0700

Jorge -
If a document has a value computed at the cost of producing the document and
not per the document's content's valuation as IP, i.e. by multiplying the
salary of the Author by the number of hours put into the work) , then we can
pretty accurately value the IETF's Portfolio date.

Lets assume that the IETF has some  4,000 plus RFC's and multiple revisions
of many and their value to deal with. The same would be true with the I-D's.
So... lets do the math - say each document takes 30 hrs to produce and that
the person doing the work makes $40/Hr ($80,000 yr). Then the cost of that
document (without any of the additional overhead) is at least $1200.

So now lets look at the RFC's and ID's posted. Lets call it just for fun
10,000 total documents published (which we know is actually a fraction of
what was published), so 10,000 x 1,200 = a minimum of $12M in IP
Submissions.  But that assumes ***only*** 30/hrs per document, and many of
the documents submitted have hundreds if not thousands of individual hours
in them. So if 30 hours is $1,200/doc, then likewise at this level, 1000
hours is $40,000 per document.

This valuation model of course does not include any of the other work that
the other participants add while vetting or otherwise, thus increasing the
value of any derivatives developed as part of the IETF's process which would
be the property of the original IP submitter. If you have any doubts of
this, then lets look at whether people are writing-down their employee's
participation or not...

So Jorge, has the IETF ever declared any of this? The IRS says "not to
date", so what is going on?  Who pays the taxes on what IP turned over to
the IETF? the IETF is not a Tax Exempt Entity as far as I can tell, so how
is this being dealt with?

Please answer this ASAP because I want to file for the bounty on these
unpaid funds which may be closer to $30M than the $12M we postulate they are
based on the formula cited above.

Todd Glassey

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