Please refer to RFC2026, section 10.3.1, point 1:
l. Some works (e.g. works of the U.S. Government) are not subject to
copyright. However, to the extent that the submission is or may
be subject to copyright, the contributor, the organization he
represents (if any) and the owners of any proprietary rights in
the contribution, grant an unlimited perpetual, non-exclusive,
royalty-free, world-wide right and license to the ISOC and the
IETF under any copyrights in the contribution. This license
includes the right to copy, publish and distribute the
contribution in any way, and to prepare derivative works that are
based on or incorporate all or part of the contribution, the
license to such derivative works to be of the same scope as the
license of the original contribution.For the purpose of the present discussion, the key word here is "perpetual". For any I-D that is considered a contribution to the IETF process, the provisions above apply, and the IETF's license to publish does not expire.
The old 1id-guidelines.txt required that I-D's be submitted with one of three pieces of boilerplate text at the top. Two of those texts indicate compliance with RFC2026 section 10, thereby explicitly acknowledging the terms above. For I-D's submitted with one of these texts, I don't think there is an issue. For I-D's submitted with the third text, it may be best to solicit continued permission to publish, or simply omit them from the repository -- after all, they are by definition not "contributions" to the IETF process, and so we presumably care less about them for archival purposes.
RFC2026 was published in 1996. So, this leaves open the question of what to do with I-D's submitted before these rules went into effect.
-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@xxxxxxx> Sr. Research Systems Programmer School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA
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