On Mon Jun 18 13:22:45 2007, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I don't see a clear license that "explicitly" grants third parties
those
rights. I see some hand waving referring to past behaviour and a
link
to a FAQ without authorship or contact information.
Given this situation, my position is that modulo a clarifying
statements
from the IETF Trust granting third parties the rights to extract and
modify parts of RFCs, we have to assume we haven't been granted
those
rights. That is how copyright law works, if I understand it
correctly.
The mere fact it's not couched in legal linguistic mumbo jumbo is
really not a big deal - anything that says "You can do X", where the
entity making that statement is capable of granting the rights
required to do X, is legally granting you those rights. If not, then
I've utterly misunderstood some fundamentals of law.
In this case, the entity is the IETF Trust, since the statements are
visible on their official website. It's possible that the site has
been hacked and this has been inserted, but I don't have any evidence
at all to support that, whereas, being linked to from the front page,
one would assume it'd have been noticed by now if it were the case.
Furthermore, given the levels of technical expertise available to the
IETF Trust, I have to consider that unlikely anyway. So I'd say the
authorship is pretty clear - in fact, it's clearer than most
copyright licenses.
The IETF Trust certainly appears to have the legal ability to grant
rights of this form - that's what BCP78, as updated, is doing. Put
another way, I have no reason to think that they don't have the
ability to grant such rights, anyway.
The statements themselves explicitly state that such rights are (and
have been) granted.
Given these, I see no reason to question the legitimacy of the grant
of rights, in the absence of any statement to the contrary.
If the IETF Trust could publish something legally binding that
covers
this, that would likely solve all my concerns with this document.
I'd say, with my imperfect knowledge of international copyright law,
that they already have published something legally binding.
But nevertheless, if something could be drafted and published by the
IETF Trust with a more formal form to it, I'd hope this could settle
the issue.
Dave.
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