Subject: Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-codec-opus-12.txt> (Definition of the Opus Audio Codec) to Proposed Standard

From: SM <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:05:39 -0700

At 13:20 26-04-2012, The IESG wrote:
>The IESG has received a request from the Internet Wideband Audio Codec WG
>(codec) to consider the following document:
>- 'Definition of the Opus Audio Codec'
>   <draft-ietf-codec-opus-12.txt> as a Proposed Standard

Section 10 about "copying conditions" mentions "without 
royalty".  There was a message to the CODEC mailing list about the 
Qualcomm IPR disclosure.  The Licensing declaration in the Huawei IPR 
disclosures do not mention royalty-free.  Was that taken into account 
by the authors for the statement in Section 10?

Could the authors please clarify what they mean by "the work" in the following:

   "The authors agree to grant third parties the irrevocable right to
    copy, use and distribute the work (excluding Code Components
    available under the simplified BSD license)"

Regards,
-sm

---

From: Stephan Wenger <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:53:13 +0000

Hi,
This subject was also raised by our AD on the codec mailing list.  The
statement is about spec text copyright (with the possible exception of the
word "use", which is loaded in this context, see BSD license and implicit
patent grant ambiguity).  Insofar, the patent licensing statement received
appear to be irrelevant to this discussion.
Generally speaking, according to the TLP, the authors are free to provide
a wider copyright grant than the TLP is providing, and they intend to do
so with this section.  See also here:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/codec/current/msg02845.html for some
justification.  The question of whether a section in the subject doc is
the right place for such a grant has not yet been answered.
My view on the latter: it's not.  One issue of having such a notice is
that it expressly allows derivative work, possibly WITHOUT removing the
IETF boilerplate and the TLP copyright notice first.  This would go
against language and spirit of the TLP.  We (the IETF) does NOT want and
do not allow derivative work of our specs outside of the IETF process.
The authors are free to publish the opus spec elsewhere, with whatever
copyright grants they wish to attach to.  But they should first remove any
references of the doc being an IETF-RFC or , more precisely, falling under
the TLP.  
Stephan