I do think that the call to only consider legal advice from lawyers, is reasonable when it comes to potential legal issues like this one. But who should bear the legal cost of this? Should it be the proponents of a given contentious request, or should it be Unicode, or someone else? And what, if any, should the default response be in the absence of legal support?
I ask this because I remember this having been seriously abused in the IETF before, on account of their rigid processes around such legal claims against them. On their part, the IETF LLC was the one who was repeatedly on the hook for investigating these claims, unable to short-circuit them with a blanket "no" response. My fear is that if Unicode makes similar such processes, this could be similarly abused by litigious members, who may or may not be acting in bad faith. The IETF lists appeals they receive, as well as their responses, at https://datatracker.ietf.org/ group/iesg/appeals/[1]. 2025-2026 saw a noticeable uptick in their incidence rate, 9 of those coming from a single member. The only other time this has happened (from what I can tell, and before my time), was in 2005-2006, with also 9 claims coming from a single member. Note also that these appeals artifacts are heavily condensed. The appeals from 2025-2026 are ones I had the displeasure of seeing be accompanied by hundreds, if not thousands, of messages in long ML threads that spanned many months of time being usurped by nonproductive arguments. I don't have any solutions to this, neither for the IETF nor for Unicode, but the IETF's process unfortunately appears to be highly exploitable. On Saturday, 30 May 2026 03:20:41 Central European Summer Time Tex via Unicode wrote: > It seems like this discussion comes up every few months. > Isn't there a FAQ we can point to, to short circuit these threads? > > Perhaps there should also be a faq stating that those offering legal > opinions should first of all be lawyers, and second of all provide an > estimate of the legal costs if their approach is pursued. I say this not to > dismiss anyone's opinion but to highlight there is no point in arguing > points of law in this list. I doubt the consortium is going to take legal > advice from this list or that something that has not already been > considered will be revealed here and that legal costs are not > inconsiderable and perhaps inestimable. > > > Tex > No AI was used authoring my text -- [Met vriendelijke groet] [Best regards] [Michael De Roover] --- --- --- --- [Mail] [*@nixmagic.com] [michael@[email protected]] [Web] [https://michael.de.roover.eu.org] [Forge] [https://git.nixmagic.com] [Weather] [Antwerpen] [12:00] [27.6°C] --- --- --- --- [0] [2026-05-30 12:13 CEST] [~] [[email protected]] [$] [/usr/bin/sign-mail] [>_] --- --- --- --- -------- [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/iesg/appeals/
