[AFS3-std] Options for AFS Standardisation

[Russ Allbery]

Simon Wilkinson <simon@sxw.org.uk> writes:

> 2.3.1.  Drafts
>
>    Proposals for standardisation are made as Internet Drafts.  These
>    documents must be compliant with all of the provisions of the IETF's
>    Guidelines to Authors of Internet Drafts [ID-Guide] and the documents
>    it references.  Note that it is not permissible for documents that
>    wish to progress through the AFS standardisation process to prohibit
>    modification or derivative works, or to bar publication as an RFC.
>    Drafts should be named as individual contributions, and contain the
>    string afs3-stds within their name.

I'd like us to specifically call out the following statement from the
Copyrights and Patent Rights in RFCs document on the RFC Editor site and
specifically state that this requirement applies to all Internet Drafts
submitted as part of this process as well:

   For independent RFC submissions, however, the RFC Editor requires that
   authors grant unlimited permission for derivative works, with
   appropriate credits and citations.

I would also like us to explicitly state that the following statement does
NOT apply, and that instead we require that such modifications be allowed
unconditionally and without requiring any permission from the author:

    Copying and distributing an entire RFC with changes in format, font,
    etc.:

    Changing format, font, etc. is allowed only with permission of the
    author(s). With this permission, rule 1. applies.

(Yes, this contradicts the statement about derivative works one section
later in that document.)

The IETF's handling of copyright and licensing of RFCs and related
documents is extremely poor and I, for one, do not trust the RFC Editor,
the IETF, the IESG, or the related organizations with licensing of
intellectual property.

I think it is extremely important that unlimited rights to reproduce,
redistribute, modify, and redistribute modified copies of these documents
be available to anyone unconditionally and I would like to see us require
this up-front as part of the standards process.

>    Note that publishing drafts in this way assigns copyright of the
>    document text to the IETF Trust.

It doesn't.  It requires the inclusion of a generally meaningless
copyright notice in the document and it requires that authors not append
their own copyright notices even though those copyrights still apply, but
that does not constitute a transfer or assignment of copyright under
United States law and it certainly isn't an assignment of copyright under
European law in countries with moral rights for authors as I understand
the law there.

Copyrights would continue to vest in the authors of the document.  This is
one of the reasons why licensing is so important.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>