Subject: [sidr] ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem (fwd)

From: Sandra Murphy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 16:14:49 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)

The WG Chairs have been asked to make their WG aware of an issue of RFC 
5378's impact on submission of internet drafts.  The IETF Trustees have 
proposed a work-around and they would like comments.  Their message is 
below.

This is a complicated subject, but the executive summary is that if you 
have an Internet-draft that quotes substantially from one or more older 
RFCs (ones with a publication date pre-November 11, 2008), and you did not 
write this earlier work yourself (or you wrote it while with another 
company), you need to be aware of the likely difficulty of obtaining 
RFC5378 clearances for your new work, and also to be aware that a 
work-around is on the way. The work-around should be in place to allow 
submissions to the San Francisco IETF well before the normal deadlines. 
See the attached text for more details.

(The previous paragraph quoted from sample text provided by Marshall 
Eubanks on the wgchairs mailing list.)

The difficulty is that RFC5378 expands the rights granted to the IETF
(see section 10 "Changes since RFC 3978" of RFC 5378 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5378.txt).

Therefore rights granted for earlier work are not sufficient to comply 
with RFC5378.

There's also this item from section 10 of RFC5378 to keep in mind:

    Clarified that Contributors enter into a legally binding contract
    when they submit a Contribution.  (See Section 5.1.)

Furthermore, there is a unresolved discussion that the earlier work might 
include wg list email messages, as they fall under the "Note Well" of what 
constitutes an IETF Contribution.  So including text in a draft that was 
provided in an email message sent before the magic date might (repeat, 
might) involve RFC 5378 rights and the work-around.

Please direct any discussion of RFC 5378 in general to the IETF Discussion 
mailing list, [email-masked].  If you need to discuss applicability of RFC 
5378 or the work-around to drafts of this working group, you may direct 
those to the sidr mailing list.

I will attempt to keep you apprised of progress in this.

--Sandy

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 16:43:50 -0500
From: Ed Juskevicius <[email-masked]>
To: 'IETF Discussion' <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], [email-masked],
     [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
Cc: 'Trustees' <[email-masked]>
Subject: ANNOUNCEMENT: The IETF Trustees invite your review and comments on a
     proposed Work-Around to the Pre-5378 Problem

The purpose of this message is twofold:

1) To summarize the issues that some members of our community
    have experienced since the publication of RFC 5378 in November 2008,
    and
2) To invite community review and discussion on a potential work-around
    being considered by the IETF Trustees.

Some I-D authors are having difficulty implementing RFC 5378.  An
example of the difficulty is as follows:

   - an author wants to include pre-5378 content in a new submission
     or contribution to the IETF, but
   - s/he is not certain that all of the author(s) of the earlier
     material have agreed to license it to the IETF Trust according
     to RFC 5378.

If an I-D author includes pre-5378 material in a new document, then s/he
must represent or warrant that all of the authors who created the
pre-5378 material have granted rights for that material to the IETF Trust.
If s/he cannot make this assertion, then s/he has a problem.

This situation has halted the progression of some Internet-Drafts and
interrupted the publication of some RFCs.  The Trustees of the IETF Trust
are investigating ways to implement a temporary work-around so that IETF
work can continue to progress.  A permanent solution to this "pre-5378
problem" may require an update to RFC 5378, for example new work by the
community to create a 5378-bis document.

The remainder of this message provides an outline of the temporary work-
around being considered by the Trustees.

RFC 5378 sections 1.j and 5.3.c provide the IETF Trust with the
authority to develop legend text for authors to use in situations where
they wish to limit the granting of rights to modify and prepare
derivatives of the documents they submit.  The Trustees used this
authority in 2008 to develop and adopt the current "Legal Provisions
Relating to IETF Documents" which are posted at:
http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info/.

The Trustees are now considering the creation of optional new legend text
which could be used by authors experiencing the "pre-5378 problem".

The new legend text, if implemented, would do the following:

   a. Provide Authors and Contributors with a way to identify (to the
      IETF Trust) that their contributions contain material from pre-5378
      documents for which RFC 5378 rights to modify the material outside
      the IETF standards process may not have been granted, and

   b. Provide the IETF Trust and the community with a clear indication
      of every document containing pre-5378 content and having the
      "pre-5378 problem".

So, how could the creation and use of some new legend text help people
work-around the pre-5378 problem?

The proposed answer is as follows:

   1. Anyone having a contribution with the "pre-5378" problem should add
      new legend text to the contribution, to clearly flag that it includes
      pre-5378 material for which all of the rights needed under RFC 5378
      may not have been granted, and

   2. The IETF Trust will consider authors and contributors (with the
      pre-5378 problem) to have met their RFC 5378 obligations if the
      new legend text appears on their documents, and

   3. Authors and contributors should only resort to adding the new
      legend text to their documents (per #1) if they cannot develop
      certainty that all of the author(s) of pre-5378 material in
      their documents have agreed to license the pre-5378 content to
      the IETF Trust according to RFC 5378.

The proposed wording for the new legend text is now available for your
review and comments in section 6.c.iii of a draft revision to the
IETF Trust's "Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents" located at
http://trustee.ietf.org/policyandprocedures.html.

Please note that the above document also contains new text in section 5.c
dealing with "License Limitations".

If your review and feedback on this proposed work-around is positive,
then the new text may be adopted by the Trustees in early February 2009,
and then be published as an official revision to the Legal Provisions
document.  If so adopted, Internet-Drafts with pre-5378 material may
advance within the Internet standards process and get published as RFCs
where otherwise qualified to do so.  Unless covered by sections 6.c.i or
6.c.ii, authors of documents in which there is no pre-5378
material must provide a RFC 5378 license with no limitation on
modifications outside the IETF standards process.

The IETF Trust will not grant the right to modify or prepare derivative
works of any specific RFC or other IETF Contribution outside the IETF
standards process until RFC 5378 rights pertaining to that document have
been obtained from all authors and after compliance by the IETF Trust
with RFC 5377.  The Trustees will establish one or more mechanisms by
which authors of pre-5378 documents may grant RFC 5378 rights.

The Trustees hereby invite your review, comments and suggestions on this
proposed work-around to the "pre-5378 problem".  The period for this review
is 30 days.  Microsoft WORD and PDF versions of the proposed revisions are
attached to this message.  Copies are also available on the IETF Trust
website under the heading "DRAFT Policy and Procedures Being Developed" at:
http://trustee.ietf.org/policyandprocedures.html

All feedback submitted before the end of February 7th will be considered by
the Trustees.  A decision on whether to move forward with this proposal will
be made and communicated to you before the end of February 15th.

Please give this your attention.

Regards and Happy New Year !

Ed Juskevicius, on behalf of the IETF Trustees
[email-masked]

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