Lloyd Wood writes:
> there's the usual boilerplate on internet-drafts
[ ... ]
> This Internet-Draft is submitted to IETF in full conformance with the
> provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.
So you expect typical participants to (A) read boilerplate, (B) know
that BCP 78 is a copyright grab, and (C) leap from an _Internet-Draft_
saying it conforms with BCP 78 to imagining that IETF has a copyright
grab by default for _all email_?
For comparison, Barnes & Noble lost in district court and again in a
unanimous appeals court in
https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/08/18/12-56628.pdf
despite a big link to its terms being visible on _every single page of
its site_ and _close to the buttons people had to click on_: "in keeping
with courts' traditional reluctance to enforce browsewrap agreements
against individual consumers, we therefore hold that where a website
makes its terms of use available via a conspicuous hyperlink on every
page of the website but otherwise provides no notice to users nor
prompts them to take any affirmative action to demonstrate assent, even
close proximity of the hyperlink to relevant buttons users must click
on---without more---is insufficient to give rise to constructive notice."
Courts also require contracts to provide "consideration"---each party
getting something. All interested parties have a right to file comments
and appeals with SDOs to begin with; IETF prominently says that "IETF
participation is free and open to all interested individuals" and that
"Anyone can participate by signing up to a working group mailing list";
what exactly does a commentator get by agreeing to allow modifications?
The situation is completely different when someone is _volunteering text
for a standard_. IETF can legitimately require modification rights for
such text. IETF's promise of free participation isn't a promise that
anything in particular will be standardized, nor is a standardization
promise part of the requirements that antitrust law places upon SDOs.
The copyright grab comes across as dishonest in part because IETF has no
legitimate reason to modify text that isn't going into a standard (as
IETF's opt-out provisions in effect admit, with BCP 78 even giving an
example), in part because the grab is _much_ less visible than the
claims of IETF allowing free participation, and in part because the
opt-out provisions are even more deeply buried. Advertising one thing
and doing another---anything that sounds like "we lied when we said
participation is free; we have a hidden provision saying what you have
to give IETF in exchange for participation"---is not a good look.
> I mentioned the Note Well slides presented by WG meeting chairs
Yes, and you've answered none of what I wrote about this. (As for your
request for brevity, please keep in mind that some issues are complex,
producing a correlation between snap answers and wrong answers.)
IETF says all official WG business is _on the WG mailing list_. IETF
invites people to participate by simply joining that list. I quoted two
examples of WG-list welcome messages, one of which said the opposite of
what you claim about copyright and the other of which didn't comment.
IETF LLC reported sending its 2024 survey to "all ~53,000 addresses
subscribed to IETF mailing lists". Far fewer people attend IETF
meetings; last number I heard was 1700.
(I'm also told that nearly 100 of those 1700 were from Cisco. Again,
please try to keep in mind that your experiences are not reflective of
most people. And, no, this does _not_ mean that the rest of us have only
second-class rights to participate in IETF.)
Furthermore, even when people _do_ read chair slides, the simple fact is
that the slides don't communicate what's going on here. Citing a policy
on copyrights isn't telling people that there's a giant copyright grab.
I already spelled out what honestly informing people would look like:
"for any email you send to any IETF mailing list, even if you're merely
commenting and not volunteering text for any IETF standards, IETF claims
the right to modify your text in any way it wants, publish the modified
text, misattribute to you things you didn't write, remove credit for
things you did write, feed your text to AI engines for manipulation, and
collect money for all of this, without asking you for any further
permission, _unless_ your email invokes the magic incantation from the
buried Legend Instructions".
> archived in meeting minutes on the publically accessible web.
This doesn't support an "all participants are aware" claim. The notion
that typical IETF participants are downloading and checking small text
on chair slides doesn't pass the laugh test.
> You present no evidence for your claim of lack of plausibility.
You're the one who made an extreme "all participants are aware" claim
based on selecting fragments of vague information briefly presented at
meetings attended by a small fraction of IETF participants. How about
commenting on the specific evidence I provided regarding the welcome
messages from IETF mailing lists?
---D. J. Bernstein
P.S. For readers bumping into this message who haven't seen the context:
Please see https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html to understand
what's actually going on here.
===== NOTICES REGARDING IETF =====
It has come to my attention that IETF LLC believes that anyone filing a
comment, objection, or appeal is engaging in a copyright giveaway by
default, for example allowing IETF LLC to feed that material into AI
systems for manipulation. Specifically, IETF LLC views any such material
as a "Contribution", and believes that WG chairs, IESG, and other IETF
LLC agents are free to modify the material "unless explicitly disallowed
in the notices contained in a Contribution (in the form specified by the
Legend Instructions)". I am hereby explicitly disallowing such
modifications. Regarding "form", my understanding is that "Legend
Instructions" currently refers to the portion of
https://web.archive.org/web/20250306221446/https://trustee.ietf.org/wp-content/uploads/Corrected-TLP-5.0-legal-provsions.pdf
saying that the situation that "the Contributor does not wish to allow
modifications nor to allow publication as an RFC" must be expressed in
the following form: "This document may not be modified, and derivative
works of it may not be created, and it may not be published except as an
Internet-Draft". That expression hereby applies to this message.
I'm fine with redistribution of copies of this message. There are no
confidentiality restrictions on this message. The issue here is with
modifications, not with dissemination.
For other people concerned about what IETF LLC is doing: Feel free to
copy these notices into your own messages. If you're preparing text for
an IETF standard, it's legitimate for IETF LLC to insist on being
allowed to modify the text; but if you're just filing comments then
there's no reason for this.
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