Perhaps you should ask this question of someone who actually _has_ studied the problem for a number of years, and has reviewed the numerous legal cases and the full text of their legal decisions, and sometimes even the motions and briefs in the case, and has reveiwed the congressional reports, and even the congressional testimony on the record. And I've been interested and involved in the legal and human aspect of various digital rights for over a dozen years. And as President of the League for Programming Freedom, have organized over a hundred very prominent computer scientists (luminaries like Don Knuth, John McCarthy, Gerald Sussman, etc,etc,etc) on the issue of User Interface Copyrights, and supervised legal briefs up to the Supreme Court. I note that Mr. Vixie has declined to participate in any of these other issues, other than to tell me that he _supports_ the notion of software patents, when I asked him to join the LPF some years ago. (Most technical people are opposed to software patents) The LPF has been fighting software patents and won on the issue of User Interface Copyrights in the Lotus V. Borland. --Dean On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Yakov Shafranovich wrote: > Paul Vixie wrote: > > nathaniel, john, i have a lot of respect for you but from reading this thread > > it's clear that you have only been studying this issue for a couple of years. > > please give it a decade, and read what's been written on the topic of digital > > rights, before you go head to head with vjs (who has been studying these > > issues as long as i, and who has definitely done his homework.) > > > > Since the IETF is a standards organization, can both you and vsj tell us > in your opinion, if there is anything the IETF should or should not be > doing in the spam arena (changing existing standards, making new > standards, etc.)? > > Yakov > >