> On 5 Jun 2026, at 10:40, Brian E Carpenter <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
> 
> On 05-Jun-26 10:26, Jay Daley wrote:
>>> On 5 Jun 2026, at 08:59, John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri, 5 Jun 2026, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>>> As I already said, I don't think we should drag the RSWG/RSAB into 
>>>> copyright
>>>> issues. We have the IETF Trust/IPMC LLC to deal with that (and impose a
>>>> disclosure requirement as part of their Legal Provisions if they decide 
>>>> it's
>>>> legally necessary).
>>> 
>>> Agreed, and it isn't.
>>> 
>>>> For me the issue is an ethical one. It feels wrong not to disclose if
>>>> an AI wrote my homework. I think we need to put that point to the 
>>>> community.
>>>> If the community doesn't want such a rule, fine, but IMHO it needs to be a
>>>> wider community than the RSWG that reaches that conclusion..
>>> 
>>> We have always allowed people to use material they didn't write in 
>>> contributions and we have never required people to say where the material 
>>> came from.  What's different now?  If people have to disclose LLM material, 
>>> do they have to disclose other PD material they use?  There has always been 
>>> a possibility that people will assume that an author wrote some chunk of a 
>>> document that he used from somwhere else.
>> I don’t think the "who wrote it" is the right lens for this.  I suspect that 
>> the big issue here is the likely huge increase in uncopyrightable text in 
>> our documents.  Sure we already have public domain/uncopyrighted text, but 
>> from my limited viewpoint it seems minor and rare, whereas we can foresee a 
>> future where it is major and commonplace.  When that happens, I don’t think 
>> our rules/processes will be adequate and an evolution will be needed to 
>> address that.  To give you a concrete example, we prevent non-IETF 
>> derivatives of IETF standards for good reasons, but if/when a standard has 
>> significant AI output incorporated into it, even if that’s light editing, 
>> will we be able to continue with that level of protection?
>> With that in mind, the key disclosure required is not if an AI wrote it, but 
>> about the copyrightable nature of the submissions.
> 
> But that's really Trust/IPMC scope, surely?


Implementing the policy the IETF decides is their role yes, but there is a 
policy gap here because of the strategic consequences of this evolution, and 
policy is for the community to decide.

> And in the end, our only defence is going to be the RFC "brand". The law 
> won't help.

I think it’s too early to tell where/how this will develop.

Jay

> 
>   Brian


-- 
Jay Daley
IETF Executive Director
[email protected]

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