Subject: RE: RFC Author Count and IPR

From: "Burger, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:18:44 -0400

Agreed.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Crocker [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 12:16 PM
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked]; [email-masked]; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: RFC Author Count and IPR

Russ Housley wrote:
> 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.

In looking over the various sub-threads on this topic, it is feeling an
awful 
lot like the discussion is trying to attend to legal issues, without
benefit of 
legal counsel. (I know that a number of the participants in the thread
have been 
dealing with this topic, for a long time, including contact with legal
counsel. 
  My point is that the current discussion either ought to include direct

contribution by an intellectual property attorney or we should largely
drop the 
issue.)

Wouldn't it make more sense for the rules concerning author list to be
dictated 
by the combination of the needs to state primary resonsibility, ie,
those 
writing the docs,  and logistics/processing needs of those publishing
it?

d/

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

_______________________________________________
Ipr-wg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipr-wg

---

From: "Lawrence Rosen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 11:57:31 -0700

Dave Crocker wrote:
> drop the issue.

I apologize. I haven't been closely following this thread because it has
been more noise than signal recently. 

As far as US copyright law is concerned, a copyright notice isn't even
required, although there are benefits to posting one. 17 USC 401 et seq. 

A single notice, in the general form "(C) Copyright 2006 IETF" is sufficient
to prevent a defendant from interposing "a defense based on innocent
infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages...." 17 USC
401(d), 402(d). This form of single notice by IETF even protects the
copyrights in the separate contributions that make up an IETF collective
work. 17 USC 404.

The real question here is one of appropriateness of notice rather than legal
requirements for notice. Speaking now not as a lawyer, I suggest we might
try to comport with societal norms for attribution in academic and
scientific professions. The law doesn't say that the provenance of the
contributions to IETF specifications must be documented in a list of
individual copyright notices, or on a website reference page, or indeed in a
dusty file cabinet in someone's house. But our scholarly training encourages
us to post convenient and complete attribution of all
contributions--including any statements of licensing that would be
appropriate to allow downstream users of that information to form their own
professional judgments about provenance--in an appropriate place.

This focus on convenient and complete information rather than "legal
requirements" also encourages us to document, in the same way, claims or
disclaimers by contributors to patents arguably embodied in IETF
specifications. Even trademark notices can be gathered in the same ways. 

This *List of Contributors/Authors* is in the form of *information provided
by others*, not *promises that these statements are true*. A disclaimer to
that effect by IETF might be prudent.

Nowadays that information can probably best be stored and accessed on web
pages associated with specific IETF specifications. Whether that information
should also be embedded within the specification itself, at the beginning or
end or in the middle, is a nit not a legal question. 

/Larry Rosen

Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
Stanford University, Lecturer in Law
3001 King Ranch Road, Ukiah, CA 95482
707-485-1242  *  fax: 707-485-1243
Author of "Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and 
                Intellectual Property Law" (Prentice Hall 2004)

> From: Burger, Eric [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 1:19 PM
> To: Dave Crocker
> Cc: [email-masked]
> Subject: RE: RFC Author Count and IPR
> 
> Agreed.