Subject: "technology-rights-01", section 4

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Feb 2003 14:29:15 -0500

I am surprised and disappointed that no one else has raised this 
point -- perhaps we have just been too distracted by the 
repetitive and off-topic RAND discussion.  And I am starting a 
separate thread in the hope that we can have a crisp discussion 
about it.  However...

Section 4 of this document essentially requires that yet more 
mindless boilerplate be incorporated into every Internet Draft. 
I believe that the community is better served, to the extent 
possible, by I-Ds that can be constructed quickly and posted, 
rather than having to be constructed in elaborate ways.  I may 
be the only one, but many of my I-Ds start out on my Palm 
device.  It is much easier to take out and use during short 
windows than bringing up a laptop.  All of this bulky 
boilerplate is really an impediment, even more so if I want to 
work on -01 or -02 on the Palm or some other lightweight 
mechanism.  It is also an impediment to finding the material in 
an I-D that is really important and relevant from a substantive 
standpoint.

Of course, tools like XML markup help with this.  With them, one 
can insert the boilerplate without looking at it -- without even 
looking at it as much as a cut and paste operation requires. 
But as soon as we appeal to those tools, any possible legal 
argument for incorporating text explicitly, rather than by 
reference, becomes largely specious.  Certainly one can make no 
stronger claim that an author has read text that was 
incorporated by a macro than if the text was incorporated by an 
explicit reference.

I also note that we have many I-Ds posted that contain 
commentary, models, and other ideas that do not constitute 
protocols or specific suggestions.  We have also heretofore 
carefully preserved our capability of publishing documents from 
other organizations or sources, unchanged, with permission and 
for the convenience of the community.   Requiring the section 4 
text ("all contributions for publication" and/or "all 
submissions for publication as an Internet Draft") is silly for 
the first group of cases and inconsistent with the objectives of 
the second.

I also note that those two conditions are not precisely 
consistent, and that we have carefully claimed, for years, that 
I-Ds are "posted", but not "published".

Have we gotten legal advice that it is necessary to incorporate 
all of this text, rather than, e.g., asserting compliance with, 
or inclusion by reference to, the text in some RFC.   If so, 
why?  And, if not, why are we aiming bullets at our feet by 
making I-Ds unnecessarily long and hard to create and manage?

    john

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