--On Wednesday, July 27, 2022 16:03 -0700 Fred Baker <fredbaker.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > My recollection is that there is no "observer" status in > US law; one is is in the conversation or one is not. For one > to be an observer, one would have to be prevented from > speaking, as otherwise one might say "oh, I'd do it <this> > way", and potentially invent something. I suspect your > approach, while understandable, would have the intellectual > property lawyers in fits. Fred, again, my interest in the legal distinctions is quite limited. I don't quite want to go so far as to say words like "irrelevant". However, almost every standards body I know of (ANSI, ISO, and ISO/IEC JTC1 included) recognize and define that status as someone who gets to watch everything but who gets to speak up only if explicitly invited. In terms that might be closer to IETF vocabulary, one might call the "lurkers" but lurkers who cannot contribute without a change of status. The terminology is clumsy, but perhaps we should be talking about non-Contributors in the same sense that I've heard WG Chairs this week say things like "if you don't agree with the Note Well provisions, be sure you do not contribute" (maybe they should be saying "get out of the room and maybe out of the hotel", but I leave that to the IESG, maybe the Trust, and the lawyers). Or perhaps "watchers" in parallel with "listeners", but that term may have other meanings too. For example, if I'm on the mailing list of a WG and maybe read it but never speak up, I may be a lurker in the IETF sense (even though I'm also registered at least with an email address to be on the list). If, by contrast, I follow that hypothetical WG only by reading the mail archives, I would be into the category of the observer/ lurker/ non-Contributor I'm talking about. It is also not much different from a lot of webinar setups where people get to watch but are not invited or enabled to speak up. As someone more or less pointed out in that long-ago thread, someone could accomplish almost the same thing by signing up for mailing lists as donald.duck.anonymous@SomeMailProvider. The IETF has problems, including IPR problems, only if said putative duck starts to contribute. To try to enforce the "on mailing list as an observer" role, we'd have to have a way to have subscribers who are not allowed to post [1]. For real-time watching, same situation applies to many legislative bodies and courtrooms where people, subject to some other rules, are allowed/invited to sit in the gallery and watch but, if they yell things out, start throwing ripe fruit, or otherwise "contribute" (or try to do so), they are likely to be escorted out, perhaps in manacles. Based on several conversations with relevant lawyers, in an organization whose participants (or membership) involves entities who are competing with each other, locking those "watching and listening to the conversation but not participating (or allowed to participate) in it" out can be a rather quick path to interactions between the intellectual property lawyers you refer to and their anti-trust counterparts. best, john [1] I fully understand the security issues associated with trying to enforce such rules, but the examples are still good ones. On the other hand, for something like Meetecho, letting someone observe, look, and listen without putting them on the participant list or showing them any participant dashboards or fields is presumably (still) fairly straightforward.
