Folks, I came across an interesting case recently where a listed author of an open standard was presumed to know the contents of the specification fully - that is, as if they had written every word. Moreover, by inference so was their employer. This came up in an IPR court case.
The (very high) level detail is here: https://github.com/w3c/webrtc-pc/issues/942#issuecomment-277034696 I'm considering advising Board that we should address this by instituting a policy whereby changes to XEPs result in all listed authors being notified (a PR will do, I imagine), and those who do not respond within a reasonable time (hand-wave, hand-wave) must be de-listed and moved to a "Previous Authors" section of the XEP. Note that this is *NOT* intended as a punishment for unresponsive authors, hence the "Previous Authors" section - it's to protect authors and their employers from legal action. I have to admit I'm surprised that such legal considerations exist, but the central argument - that if your name is on a document, you're presumed to know what it contains - seems sufficiently intuitive that we should take notice. Comments? Dave. _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list Info: https://mail.jabber.org/mailman/listinfo/standards Unsubscribe: [email protected] _______________________________________________
