Subject: Re: Topic drift Re: An Internet Draft as reference material

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 11:30:00 -0700 (PDT)

*> 
  *> one point you are ignoring when it comes to publishing just
  *> anything as an RFC:  once it has that designation "RFC",
  *> THE IDEA IS SANCTIFIED, no matter what disclaimers you
  *> plaster all over it.  (Even a biohazard symbol with a
  *> legend reading "DANGER: LIVE EBOLA" wouldn't help. Ooops -
  *> can't do the symbol in ASCII - sorry - bad idea.)
  *> 
  *> i know it isn't supposed to be this way, but 
  *> 
  *> 	THIS IS REALITY - GET OVER IT.
  *> 
  *> the IETF has been in denial about this problem
  *> for many years. I personally submitted an alternative
  *> which was roundly defeated as it had the temerity to
  *> try and bring intent in line with current reality.
  *> 
  *> instead, people decided to continue insisting that
  *> reality was as they desired, not as it is.
  *> 
  *> until this get fixed, worrying about any one
  *> incident is worse than pointless - it continues
  *> the denial.
  *> 
  *> have a nice day.
  *> 
  *> 	-mo
  *> 

Mike,

I frankly don't understand the causal relationship between the fact
that some people in the larger community don't get it, and publishing
your very valuable and influential I-D as an Informational RFC.  If you
submit your valuable draft as an Informational RFC, I expect it will
get published, as have many others.  And I believe that this would be
service to the community.

  *> PS - i let the draft in question expire because i wanted to.
  *> that's the nice thing about expiry - the author retains a tiny
  *> modicum of control over something.  the notion that people
  *> other than the author can usurp control and publish it anyway
  *> is repugnant and is plagarism, pure and simple, no matter
  *> whether the author gets listed or not.  you didn't have permission,
  *> it's plagarism, if not theft.
  *> 
  *> 
Agreed.

Bob Braden

---

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 01 Oct 2000 15:44:45 -0400

Copyright does not protect ideas, just expression of these ideas. Thus,
anybody can take the ideas expressed in an I-D, expired or not, wrong or
not, and use them in any way he or she pleases, whether the author
appreciates this or not. (With the exception of patents, but they only
restrict implementation of the ideas, not writing about them or using
them otherwise in public discourse.) There is no way to prevent this,
nor it is immoral or illegal. Once something has been "said" in public,
the ideas are fair game, forever. The author can't say "I'm sorry, I
didn't meant to say this". Obviously, a conscientious author will try to
find out whether this is the last word of the author, but there's
nothing wrong with saying "In 1996 [17], John Doe claimed that the earth
was flat; he later changed his mind [18] to indicate that it was a
cylinder."

If Internet drafts disappear, the conscientious author is in a quandary:
he cannot give credit to the ideas in a way which is traceable by the
reader. Thus, the reader cannot easily check whether the author
misrepresented the ideas, for example. Thus, removing I-Ds makes
plagiarism and misrepresentation ("I vaguely recall John Doe saying this
in some I-D, but I have no easy way of checking this.") more, not less,
likely.

(As in Merriam Webster: plagiarism
 to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own
                        : use (another's production) without crediting
the source
                        intransitive senses : to commit literary theft :
present as new and original an idea or
                        product derived from an existing source)

Thus, plagiarism is *not* using the 8+8 draft, but having no good way to
refer to the original source.

Also, in many cases, it is important to indicate when the idea
originated, not just for patent disputes. In other areas, workshop and
conference proceedings provide some record that preceeds archival
journals, and archival journals generally also indicate when the paper
was submitted. Even with an RFC, I have no way to tell whether the idea
that was published as an RFC in 2000 was novel when it first appeared in
an Internet draft many years earlier.

I've never seen a copyright statement that limits the use of the ideas.
This seems very foreign to the concept of free scholarly exchange and
the notion of copyright. (As far as I understand it, copyright protects
the financial interests of the author, his intellectual claims of
ownership and distortion of the ideas, but does not protect authors from
embarrassment.)

The analogy of comparing I-Ds to submission to journals does not hold.
Journal and conference submissions are treated as confidential by all
parties; there is no notion of anything resembling public access. All
reviewers agree that this is not to be distributed, etc. Claiming that
this applies to things kept in hundreds of copies for free access is a
stretch, to say the least, and has, as far as I can tell, no analogue in
any other area of publishing or copyright.

Also, standard fair use doctrine says that anybody can, without the
author's permission, quote pieces of the copyrighted work if it is for
criticism or other scholarly pursuits. Fair use does not include,
obviously, republishing the whole I-D.

There is another aspect which I think has been ignored in this whole
exchange: some fraction of I-D authors either don't care whether I-Ds
are kept forever or would actually prefer this, for example because it's
a lot easier to say to plagiarists or companies patenting one's ideas
"you should have looked at the IETF web site under 'old drafts'". Saying
"if you knew the title of the I-D and could sift through tens of
thousands of entries in google containing the word MPLS and light bulb,
you could have found this in some dusty forgotten archive somewhere" is
far less convincing.

Maybe it would help if the I-D boilerplate could be enhanced to state
what "expires" means explicitly, giving authors a choice as to whether
public archival is intended or not. The notion that documents made
available to thousands have an expiration date that restricts
publication after that is, as far as I can tell, a concept not found
anywhere else.

Henning

-- 
Henning Schulzrinne   http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs

---

From: Kent Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Oct 2000 13:32:03 -0700

On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 11:30:00AM -0700, Bob Braden wrote:
[...]
>   *> it's plagarism, if not theft.

It clearly is *not* plagerism -- the author is correctly identified. 
Whether it is theft or not depends on the meaning of the term "expires",
and I submit that the definition is simply not clear.  Consider the 
following case:

The drafts were put out for six months in public view, and explicitly or
implicitly, the intent was that those drafts could be copied at will and
studied at will, and that copying and studying was certainly not limited
to six months, because a draft or portions of it could at any time be
emailed or otherwise copied and be used.  The IETF obviously had no
control over who could copy that work, and moreover the author
*certainly* knew that the IETF had no control over who could copy it. 
That is, the author of the draft made it available with the clear
knowledge that it could be copied freely.  Under those circumstances the
author would have a hard time trying to claim that everyone who made a
copy of that draft for their own purposes during that time must now go
and destroy them, and that would include the IETF itself.  Just because
something is removed from the drafts directory after 6 months (which is
what "expires" means) doesn't mean it gets erased everywhere else, and
everyone knows it, including the authors.

I suppose that if the draft contained language that claimed stronger
rights, and the IETF accepted it, then the IETF would be bound by 
whatever language was in the particular draft in question, and those 
authors might be able to make some claim against the IETF.  But in the 
default case no such claim would be possible.

I'm sure it would be an interesting legal case...

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Do good, and you'll be
[email-masked]                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain