> You can improve any technology you want, modulo IPR -- that's not the > point here. The problem is taking existing copyrighted text and using > it as a base for describing your technology. That's indeed the problem we stumbled upon years ago. Suppose that a contributor has written a complete description of technology X, getting it published as a 100 pages RFC. A remarkable feat, and a great contribution to the community. A few years letter, the working group realizes that they like the technology, but would like to change a couple options. That normally translates into changing a paragraph or two, resulting in a new RFC, more than 90% identical to the previous one. Suppose now that for whatever reasons, the original author disagrees with the changes, or with the new management of the working group, or with the new editor. People are human, these things do happen. IANAL, but my understanding at the time was that the original copyright still applied to the original text, and that the working group would be left with only bad options. They could issue a delta RFC that only contained the modifications, but that is somewhat confusing for the readers. Or they could undertake a complete rewriting of the standard, but that takes a long time and is also prone to errors and confusion. This is very much why we got the statement on copyrights in RFC 1602, in 1996. You will notice that copyrights were only mentioned as something we might need to worry about later in the appendix of the previous rules, RFC 1310 published in 1992. -- Christian Huitema _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf