Subject: RFC Author Count and IPR

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 12:37:25 -0400

I am concerned that the current RFC Editor practice that limits the 
number of authors is in conflict with the IETF IPR policies.  The RFC 
Editor currently limits the author count to five people.  Recent IPR 
WG discussions make it clear to me that authors retain significant copyright.

In one of the working groups in the Security Area, there is a 
document with six authors on it.  I asked the WG chairs to reduce the 
author count in the hope of avoiding a problem down the road.  At 
that time, I was not aware of the copyright.  Now, I think I gave the 
WG Chairs inappropriate directions.

The IESG and the whole Internet Community needs clear direction on 
this issue.  I suspect that the IPR WG will be a part of the process 
to resolve it.  Also, the Tech Spec document, which is currently in 
Last Call, many need to include a requirement that the RFC Editor 
explicitly acknowledge copyright holders in some fashion.

Russ

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From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 19:13:45 +0200

Dear Russ,
the authors can either be individuals or WGs. The practice to quote 
authors for WG documents while they are a cooperative work seems a 
wrong practice to me. Copyrights' period take into consideration the 
date of the death of the last contributor. The name of all the 
members of a WG should be noted if the rights are not exclusively 
with the IETF. When a group of individuals wants to propose a 
document its members known the numerus clausus before (whatever the 
number). The missing possibility is for an entity to introduce a 
collective Draft. Only IAN, IESG, etc.can introduce a Draft under 
their name. IMHO WG2 and R&D organisations should too.
jfc

At 18:37 24/05/2006, Russ Housley wrote:

>number of authors is in conflict with the IETF IPR policies.  The 
>RFC Editor currently limits the author count to five people.  Recent 
>IPR WG discussions make it clear to me that authors retain 
>significant copyright.
>
>document with six authors on it.  I asked the WG chairs to reduce 
>the author count in the hope of avoiding a problem down the 
>road.  At that time, I was not aware of the copyright.  Now, I think 
>I gave the WG Chairs inappropriate directions.
>

---

From: Masataka Ohta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 May 2006 02:21:33 +0900

Russ Housley wrote:

> Editor currently limits the author count to five people.

FYI, that is a violation of Article 6bis of Berne convention:

(1) Independently of the author's economic rights, and even after the
transfer of the said rights, the author shall have the right to claim
authorship of the work and to object to any distortion, mutilation or
other modification of, or other derogatory action in relation to, the
said work, which would be prejudicial to his honor or reputation.

That is, in most countries including US, no one can distort the
real authorship (perhaps without spontaneous consent from the
authors).

						Masataka Ohta

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:06:17 -0400

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Housley <[email-masked]> writes:

    Russ> I am concerned that the current RFC Editor practice that
    Russ> limits the number of authors is in conflict with the IETF
    Russ> IPR policies.  The RFC Editor currently limits the author
    Russ> count to five people.  Recent IPR WG discussions make it
    Russ> clear to me that authors retain significant copyright.

[There is this concept in US copyright law called a joint work.  I'm
ignoring that concept for the moment basically because I don't
understand how it applies to either software or text developed using
an open process.  As far as I can tell, no one else understands it
either.  Please be aware that this may be a huge gap in my advice.]

So, here we have a conflicting definitions problem.

The author of a work retains the copyright interest.  That's true if
if I'm listed as an author or not.

If I write text and do not assign the copyright to someone, I retain
copyright interest in that text.

So the sixth person still owns the copyright interest in the text they
write even if they are not listed.

That means if you have unlisted authors who have contributed
significant chunks of text, you still need to get their clearance to
do anything interesting with that text.

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:22:31 -0400

Sam:

We need a way to track the people that have copyright interest.  I 
had always assumed this was the author list.  If we are going to 
continue to limit the author count to five people, then there needs 
to be a place where the people with copyright interest are listed in 
the document.  This is the reason that I included the techspec mail 
list on my posting.

Russ

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:22:31 -0400

Sam:

Russ

---

From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:25:27 -0400

If I remember correctly, we only limit the number of suthors on the
first page of the document. 

It is perfectly acceptable to list a longer set of names inside the
document in an contributors section.

I also have concerns about who should be listed as an "author" and
have copyrights when a work is developed by a WG. The demand to do
things with IETF documents beyond IETF standards work seems to be
growing, so it will be an increasingly difficult problem if we do not
identify all the people who contributed significant portions of a
document (where significant is of course open to debate).

dbh

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sam Hartman [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 2:06 PM
> To: Russ Housley
> Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; 
> [email-masked]; [email-masked]
> Subject: Re: RFC Author Count and IPR
> 
>

---

From: "Vijay Devarapallli" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 11:30:50 -0700

> do anything interesting with that text.

typically the unlisted authors are ignored.

also during the AUTH48 period, the RFC Editor contacts only the listed authors.

Vijay

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:35:45 -0400

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Housley <[email-masked]> writes:

    Russ> Sam: We need a way to track the people that have copyright
    Russ> interest.  I had always assumed this was the author list.
    Russ> If we are going to continue to limit the author count to
    Russ> five people, then there needs to be a place where the people
    Russ> with copyright interest are listed in the document.  This is
    Russ> the reason that I included the techspec mail list on my
    Russ> posting.

I think that's probably authors?+contributors.

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:42:00 -0400

Sam:

If the people with copyright interest areFrom [email-masked] Wed May 24 14:46:19 2006
From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 11:42:43 -0700 (PDT)
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked],
	[email-masked]
Subject: Re: RFC Author Count and IPR

  *> That means if you have unlisted authors who have contributed
  *> significant chunks of text, you still need to get their clearance to
  *> do anything interesting with that text.
  *> 

Who decides what constitutes a "significant chunk"? 

Bob Braden

---

From: Russ Housley <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:42:00 -0400

Sam:

If the people with copyright interest are the combination of the 
authors plus the contributors, then we need to specify this in a BCP.

Does the RFC Editor have to contact the members of both lists during 
Auth48?  If so, I would suggest that the RFf Editor only needs a 
positive reply from the authors, but that the contributors only need 
to respond if they discover a change that is needed.

Russ

 the combination of the 
authors plus the contributors, then we need to specify this in a BCP.

Does the RFC Editor have to contact the members of both lists during 
Auth48?  If so, I would suggest that the RFf Editor only needs a 
positive reply from the authors, but that the contributors only need 
to respond if they discover a change that is needed.

Russ

---

From: Henning Schulzrinne <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:43:00 -0400

Authorship discussions have a long history in the sciences. I'm not 
aware of any other scientific or technical publication that limits the 
number of authors. (Indeed, I have had to extend the maximum author 
count on a largish conference management system I run [edas.info] a few 
times.) The current limit of 5 seems to be motivated by formatting 
constraints and maybe by the notion that "vanity" publishing should be 
prevented. It is not clear to me that these motivations have legal 
standing and essentially, for practical purposes, force authors to give 
up their rights. In the past, I know that for some drafts, this limit 
has been extended when the AD made the right noises to the RFC editor, 
so it is not universally observed.

My understanding is that "contributors" generally have inferior rights, 
not much different from those individuals acknowledged in the 
acknowledgment section of technical papers and RFCs.

After some of the recent science scandals, there also seems to be a 
movement afoot (e.g., for Science and Nature) to force all authors to 
take responsibility for the paper and its content. That's a flip-side, 
also from an IPR perspective: If somebody can plausibly claim that they 
just got added to the author list without their consent, they could 
weasle out of the IPR disclosure rules. At least from my experience, it 
is not uncommon that I-D authors add others as a courtesy and, 
currently, nobody seems to check whether these authors consented to 
being an author...

Henning

Vijay Devarapallli wrote:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

---

From: Ken Raeburn <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:58:38 -0400

> authors plus the contributors, then we need to specify this in a BCP.

We might also want to suggest that the acknowledgment specifically  
indicate if someone contributed text, as a text-contributor may have  
rights that an idea-contributor does not.  With the default  
assumption being that "contributed", if not clarified, means  
"contributed text and/or ideas".

There's also the related issue of text taken from a previous RFC -- I  
would think it would suffice to acknowledge the source of the text,  
rather than merging contributor/author lists.  (Though if the  
previous author list is small and the copied text is large, specific,  
explicit acknowledgment in the new document is probably the polite  
thing to do.)  But either way, those authors may also retain  
copyright interest in the new document.

> Does the RFC Editor have to contact the members of both lists  
> during Auth48?  If so, I would suggest that the RFf Editor only  
> needs a positive reply from the authors, but that the contributors  
> only need to respond if they discover a change that is needed.

I would think the RFC Editor probably does not need to; after all,  
isn't the short list also (a superset of) the people already acting  
as editors on behalf of the working group, other contributors, etc?   
Those people may choose to include various contributors in the Auth48  
review, or not.

Ken

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 15:16:20 -0400

>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Housley <[email-masked]> writes:

    Russ> Sam: If the people with copyright interest are the
    Russ> combination of the authors plus the contributors, then we
    Russ> need to specify this in a BCP.

The people with copyright interest are whoever the court decides have
copyright interest.  I.E. only available on lazy evaluation.

I agree we may want to specify in our publishing practices that we
keep track of who we think has copyright interest.

---

From: Andy Bierman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 12:03:54 -0700

> document in an contributors section.

It's not just the first page.
It also affects the reference citation used in
the RFC Index and all other RFCs.

I believe the 5 author rule was used as justification to remove
most of the original SNMPv2 authors from the author list and all
further reference citations, when the RFC 1901-1909 series was
advanced.  I don't really understand what purpose this serves.

> document (where significant is of course open to debate).

There is a problem with companies piling on the authors
for I-D proposals to make it look like lots of people
worked really hard on it and all agree on the contents.
(This is hardly ever the case.)

Then when you go to WG draft, there are already 5 or 7 names
as authors, and the WG wants to add more.  I think then, you
have to pick a real Editor (responsible for all edits all
the way through AUTH48) and just list that person as Editor
on the first page and citations, and put everybody in
the Authors section in the back.

IMO, this is different than removing the author(s) of a previous
version of an RFC.  I object to that practice.

> dbh

Andy

---

From: "Spencer Dawkins" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 14:42:39 -0500

Dropping techspec and ipr-wg from this part of the thread

> The current limit of 5 seems to be motivated by formatting constraints and 
> maybe by the notion that "vanity" publishing should be prevented. It is 
> not clear to me that these motivations have legal standing and 
> essentially, for practical purposes, force authors to give up their 
> rights. In the past, I know that for some drafts, this limit has been 
> extended when the AD made the right noises to the RFC editor, so it is not 
> universally observed.

People can tell me that I've been misleading WG chairs and editors, but what 
I've been saying in the WG Leadership tutorial is that the 5-author limit 
resulted from

- the practice of contacting authors at AUTH48, only to find out that more 
authors increase the likelihood of job changes and/or e-mail bounces, plus

- several "dog-pile" author lists on drafts with a huge number of authors, 
leading us to suspect that this was an effort to demonstrate "support" from 
a large group of vendors ("so this should be a WG draft and WGLCed 
immediately"), plus

- text formatting software that "broke" when the author list wouldn't fit on 
one page because there were so many authors.

I hear Russ's concern about tracking IPR sources, but hope this doesn't get 
conflated with author/editor tracking.

I'm the draft editor for the Softwires problem statement, which would have 
seven authors (including me), except that we're trying to observe the 
five-author guideline. Since this causes some heartburn, what I've been 
thinking about proposing was

- if you have individual authors, you do both the front page and the author 
section as we do them today

- if you have an editor, you list the editor on the front page, but not the 
authors, and you list both editors and authors listed in the author section 
(as we do today)

But I'm still thinking...

Thanks,

Spencer