So, Jay and Brad, Obviously legal counsel was consulted. Were the Trustees of the IETF Trust, who are supposed to be responsible for any IPR that the IETF owns sufficiently to make rules about what can be done with it, consulted? My understanding of role of the IETF Administration LLC, from the day the IASA2 WG effort started (if not a bit earlier) is that the relationship between the LLC and the IETF rested on two critical principles: The LLC does not take any actions that could interfere with or change the standards process. And responsibility for the IETF's IPR and decisions about circumstances in which it can be utilized or restricted belong exclusively to the processes that produced BCP 78 and 79 (and that might create updates or revisions to them in the future), to the IETF Trust, and to Trustees who are accountable to the community. Mistakes get made and it is unsurprising that humans, especially humans who are dealing with unusual circumstances, stress, and the pressure or time will sometimes make them. When those mistakes are pointed out, their swift correction is much appreciated (at least by me and I hope by others). However --and I am addressing this much more to the LLC Board than to Jay and/or Brad-- it is, at least IMO, your job, whether explicit in the many IASA2 documents or not, to ensure that your staff and your contractors are sufficiently educated about the IETF to understand those boundaries. Part of that is that the LLC leadership and staff are not "in charge of the IETF". The IESG has a much better claim to that responsibility and authority, but the procedures and traditions significantly even constrain even them. Just my opinion but, because of how the IETF works and its mission and credibility, while the LLC obviously has to be fiscally responsible, if there are choices between a possible incremental few dollars and openness and inclusiveness or between trying to pass rules to prevent people from abusing the system and trusting that active IETF participants will behave like responsible professionals, the decisions should favor openness, inclusiveness, and assumptions that people will behave professionally. If people don't behave professionally, we have a different sort of problem but, at least in theory, we have ways to deal with that and, fwiw, they are not the LLC's problem (or within the LLC's scope) either. If the LLC cannot take responsibility for keeping those boundaries clear, then I think the LLC plan was a mistake and the IETF community has a rather serious problem. Finally, please consider that the proposed (now removed) policy requirement might even make poor fiscal sense. Suppose there is some large company or organization that had been supporting the IETF (perhaps via donations to ISOC) for years but also had personnel who participated in the IETF's technical work (as you know, there are several such companies). Suppose those people and their management had established a practice of using recordings of IETF sessions for internal briefings about the IETF's work. Now we come along and say what might be heard as that "the IETF has started to count beans and distrust that our employees will use information responsibility". If a corporate executive got that information and overreacted it could easily result in restrictions on IETF participation by company employees and/or the end of those donations. That scenario is, I assume and hope, rather unlikely but so (given the comments about professionalism above and elsewhere) are the odds of collecting more than a handful of extra registration fees from people who would otherwise beat the system. Trading the possible benefit of collecting even a few thousand dollars in extra fees against the possible loss of, say, a $50K contribution suggests that this is the wrong way to think about the issues even if all of the non-fiscal considerations were ignored. thanks for listening, john --On Tuesday, June 9, 2020 15:44 -0700 Brad Biddle <brad@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Let me add an apology from the legal side. We provided fairly > generic language we've used in other contexts without > carefully considering the unique culture, technical > circumstances and IPR dynamics of the IETF. We'll be more > mindful of this going forward. > > --Brad > (IETF counsel)
