Given that a large number of drafts, including even draft-bradner-submission-rights-00.txt currently end in a boilerplate saying copyright "(year)" or an out-of-date year because the boilerplate has been cut and pasted from a previous draft, it would be impossible to rely on the information that you propose. Draft authors aren't generally awfully hot on proofing such details. The IETF has mailing list records, where draft submissions are announced and ideas are recorded. Isn't that sufficient? L. and if you're going to use ISO 8601 date format, specify it's that. On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, John C Klensin wrote: > Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 08:30:21 -0400 > From: John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com> > To: ietf@ietf.org > Cc: rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org > Subject: IPR and I-D boilerplate > > Hi. > > I've recently had another close encounter with the patent system > and notions of prior art. It occurs to me that we could make a > slight modification to the Internet Draft structure and encourage > including an additional bit of information that would be quite > helpful in some cases: > > Lets say we have draft-ietf-foo-bar-09.txt. It bears a date, but > usually gives no clue about when the basic ideas were first > exposed to the Internet community. For determining when an idea > became part of the common knowledge and practice of experts in > the field, that information is all-important. So I think we > should encourage Internet-Draft editors and authors to list a > revision history when they consider it important. > > This could be as simple as a note similar to that used by many > journals, i.e., a line that says "first version posted > 2000.04.01" or "first submitted 1999.12.25". Or the author > could choose to list each version number, the date, and perhaps a > brief summary of major ideas introduced. > > And, where it seems appropriate to the authors or the community, > it seems to me that we might reasonably ask the RFC Editor to > carry these data forward into the archival form of the document > (if an RFC is actually produced). > > Note that I am _not_ recommending a rule or requirement. Only > that we examine the advantages of having history and tracking > information available in cases where I-Ds are documenting > protocol ideas that could be subject to IPR claims and that, when > having it seems useful to someone, that we encourage documenting > and keeping it in very public ways. <http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>