On Jan 21, 2009, at 12:16 PM, Bob Braden wrote:
At 11:58 PM 1/20/2009, Dean Willis wrote:
Given that we've historically weeded out the contributor-list on a
document to "four or less", even if there were really dozens of
"contributors" at the alleged insistence of the RFC Editor, I don't
see how any older document or even a majority of new documents-in-
progress could be adapted to the new rules.
Whoa! This contains several errors of fact and implication. The
number authors named
on the front page of an RFC are generally limited to 5 (there are
occasional exceptions for
good cause). This rule was arrived at after discussions in
the IETF and it has enjoyed general community support; it was not
"at the insistence of the RFC
Editor". The RFC Editor 's role was to alert the community to a
tendency towards
ballooning of author lists when every telecomm vendor wanted their
name on the
RFC, and perhaps it is true that the magic number "5" (which could
have been 4 or 6 or ....)
was chosen and documented by the RFC Editor. Otherwise, it was a
community
consensus.
At the time that the 5 limit was put in place, a new Contributors
section was added to RFCs
to contain the overflow authors/contributors.
Yes, 5 is the number I should have said, and I'll accept your
description of the history involved. Note my use of the term "alleged"
in ascribing the origin to RFCEd; it is what I recall my AD telling me
at the time. As the judge might say, this is "hearsay", and
inadmissible in court ;-).
It is my personal opinion, based on this history, that for IPR
purposes we ought to treat
those listed in the Contributors sections as having equal copyrights
to those named on
the front page. (Maybe the Contributors section ought to come early
in the RFC, rather
than late. but that would be another discussion.) OTOH, the RFC
Editor recoils from the
idea that those in the Contributors section should logically be
included in the AUTH48
process; let's not!.
I concur that Contributors need to be considered from a copyright/IPR
perspective.
The problem is that every RFC I'm aware of that was produced by a
working contains tens to hundreds of contributions made either on-
list, off-list (direct to an editor, or indirectly through another
contributor and onto an editor) or made verbally, possibly at a
microphone, possibly in a hallway discussion, or possibly at a meeting
of an entirely different SDO, such as 3GPP or OMA, and relayed
directly or indirectly into IETF.
We don't track these in the Author's section, and generally only the
most vigorous of such contributors are noted as Contributors in common
practice. We might have to change this, and Theo has outlined one
procedure for doing so using source-control, although we'd need to
extend this to cover the additional contribution channels (which could
be really hard).
While NEW contributions brought into IETF might ostensibly be covered
by our "Note Well", it seems that this would NOT apply to any document
currently in-progress, or any document derived from a pre-5378 document.
Consequently, the only way to develop a document that I could sign off
as being "RFC 5378 compliant" in the fullest sense would be clean-room
development; that is, it would have to be started post-5378, copy no
text from pre-5378 documents (or external specifications), and have
the provenance of every contribution to the document carefully
recorded for the purpose of tracking the assignment and assignability
of rights related to that contribution. Even then, it could get foiled
by somebody accidentally including a blurb overheard at a 3GPP
meeting; while this might protect the IETF's liability, it could still
taint the document. Of course, that's nothing new, and we've lived
with that aspect so far.
Otherwise said, since we don't have a record of the contributions made
to pre-5378 documents, we can never be sure that the rights necessary
to publish the document with a full assignment-of-rights ala RFC 5378
have actually been granted. At best, we can assume that the untracked
contributions were made under the IPR terms of the time, which
obviously have a lesser scope than RFC 5378. So the only thing we can
do with any documents that were discussed on-list, a a meeting, or
otherwise contain pre-5378 contributions is to publish them with a
restricted rights statement.
Caveat: I'm not a lawyer. I professionally consult to lawyers about
technical aspects of intellectual property, and this whole thing makes
my head throb worse than tensor calculus. I hope I'm completely wrong
about everything I think I understand.
--
Dean
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