On Dec 19, 2008, at 6:04 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
Harald Alvestrand <har...@alvestrand.no> writes:
I will check into this. Ideally, all boilerplate would be owned
by the
IETF Trust, but I am not aware that anyone has ever focused on this
material. Technically, the copyright owner would be the author(s)
who
wrote the first document that says those words. However, the
copyright
in such generic phrases is vestigial at best.
Jorge, would the fact that people have acted as if these phrases can
be copied freely for the last 20 years create a presumption that the
copyright holders (if any) have given permission for their free
copying?
Didn't earlier IETF legal policies give permission to re-use these
phrases within the IETF standards process?
(I tracked the first sentence of the "Managed objects are accessed"
phrase back to RFC 1065, August 1988; authors-of-record were Marshall
Rose and Keith McCloghrie. There were drafts before that, of course.)
That date is before RFC 1310 which makes things more interesting.
Even more interesting is that the date is before 1 March 1989, when
the
US signed the Berne convention. According to:
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/
1978 to 1 March 1989
Published without notice, and without subsequent registration within
5 years
In the public domain
I had forgotten that - the Trust Counsel should give a reading on this.
I think that a list needs to be maintained of RFC5378 compliant works.
If RFCs published before
a certain date are all public domain, then that would save a lot of
trouble, as they could all be added to the
list. (If they are PD, then others can modify them freely, and there
are no rights to grant.)
Thus, the RFC 1065 document would now appear to be in the public
domain,
since it does not contain a copyright notice, and assuming nobody
registered for a copyright on it within 5 years.
With deep apologies to Victor Hugo, I think that the combination of
very long terms (life of the author + 70 years)
and no requirement for notice or registration has been an unmitigated
disaster for the public good. This
is not the place to discuss that, though.
Regards
Marshall
/Simon
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