Subject: Issues with the IETF Trust license text

From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:01:31 +0100

I have reviewed the Trust license proposal, version of July 17, and have 
identified some points on which I believe that there's a difference 
between the expressed wishes of the WG as expressed in -outgoing and the 
Trust's statement.

Three points are important enough that I want to bring the WG's 
attention to them before tomorrow's WG meeting. These are:

1) The Trust document appears to give no license to use Contributions 
that are not IETF Documents, not even
within the IETF Standards Process. I believe that's contrary
to -outgoing.

 From -incoming:

   a. "Contribution": any submission to the IETF intended by the
      Contributor for publication as all or part of an Internet-Draft or
      RFC (except for RFC Editor Contributions described in Section 4
      below) and any statement made within the context of an IETF
      activity. Such statements include oral statements in IETF
      sessions, as well as written and electronic communications made at
      any time or place, which are addressed to:
      o the IETF plenary session,
      o any IETF working group or portion thereof,
      o any Birds of a Feather (BOF) session,
      o the IESG, or any member thereof on behalf of the IESG,
      o the IAB or any member thereof on behalf of the IAB,
      o any IETF mailing list, including the IETF list itself, any
         working group or design team list, or any other list
         functioning under IETF auspices,
      o the RFC Editor or the Internet-Drafts function (except for RFC
         Editor Contributions described in Section 4 below).

We need to have the license to quote from people's emails too.

2) There is no license to reproduce I-Ds outside the IETF Standards Process.

 From -outgoing:

4.2.  Rights Granted for Quoting from IETF Contributions

   There is rough consensus that it is useful to permit the quoting
   without modification of excerpts from IETF Contributions.  Such
   excerpts may be of any length and in any context.  Translation of
   quotations is also to be permitted.  All such quotations should be
   attributed properly to the IETF and the IETF contribution from which
   they are taken.

Note the lack of any limitation to RFCs. (an earlier version had "IETF
documents", but this was changed; no version ever limited it to RFCs.)

3) There is no description of supersedure by a new version of the Trust 
Legal Provisions document. Since a major goal of the split between RFC 
text and legal provisions was to make legal provisions easy to update, 
that's
a major issue.

I have called Jorge's attention to these, and he believes they are 
relatively easy to fix. I hope these are the only important points.

                    Harald Alvestrand, speaking as contributor
_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg