On 08-Jun-26 10:11, Jay Daley wrote:
Scott
On 8 Jun 2026, at 08:47, Scott O. Bradner <[email protected]> wrote:
Jay
On Jun 4, 2026, at 6:26 PM, Jay Daley <[email protected]> wrote:
Snip
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?
Note that the authors can do anything they want to do, we have no role
You say - “preventing non-IETF derivatives of IETF standards” is something the
IETF does - can you provide specific examples of the
IETF doing this?
Before I answer, for those who don’t know this subject as well as us, here’s
the explicit statement in the TLP:
" d. Licenses that are not Granted. The following licenses are not granted
pursuant to these Legal Provisions:
i. any license to modify IETF Contributions or IETF Documents, or portions thereof
(other than to make translations or to extract, use and modify Code Components as
permitted under the licenses granted under Section 4 of these Legal Provisions) in
any context outside the IETF Standards Process, or"
If you are asking when the IETF has enforced this, I don’t know but I don’t
believe it has while I’ve been in post (last 6ish years). I would say this is
strong evidence of the power of IETF policies and the licensing framework that
instantiates them and if they were removed then derivations would proliferate.
Scott. (Trying to understand why you think that AI disclosure is important (or
even useful)
Having read John’s recent posts on this, I can see a danger in this disclosure
i had not seen before, that some people might naively assume that any of our
documents that use AI cannot be copyrighted per se and therefore our licensing
rules are invalid.
Hmm. It's certainly true that in the wider public, there is a great deal of FUD
about AI and copyright, and people may well draw false conclusions. But I doubt
if this extends to corporate standards IPR lawyers. However, of course,
whatever we come to agree on here (even if it's to say nothing) needs to be
reviewed by counsel.
One issue about saying nothing is that I fully expect law changes to be enacted
in various jurisdictions and some of them may have retroactive effects. That
would create legal vagueness around documents that might or might not have been
published with AI content. But anyway, all this ought to be referred to the
Trust/IPMC. I think our discussion here should be about ethical expectations.
Brian
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