Speaking as an individual, IANAL, etc., a few general comments... First, overall, the issues John raises are real and need to be addressed, IMO. Second, I know of cases (while I was AD) where a WG participant owned the copyright on an ID the WG had been discussing, and then balked at making requested changes. In at least one case, a document was rewritten in "clean room" fashion to get around potential problems. We do not want to do these sorts of things. They are painful and frustrating, they delay work, and they are a drain on precious cycles that could better be spent doing other things. Such scenarios may not happen often, but they can (and have) happened. Some former IETF participants have walked away from the IETF in a disgruntled fashion. In no way would it be acceptable for the IETF as an organization to allow anyone to have the potential ability to block IETF work by withholding any needed additional/new rights. Yet, that is what RFC 5378 appears to do. One of the "features" of the current IETF IPR (not copyright) policies is that each individual WG decides on a case-by-case basis what to do with IPR assertions. Those discussions are often messy, non-terminating and contentious because there are unknowns (i.e., unquantifiable future risk), and the normal rules engineers follow don't apply (e.g., the lawyers and licensing folk see issues very differently than engineers do). Different people (and companies) see the risks very differently. So what works for one individual won't work for someone else. Placing the responsibility on individual authors (and by implication their employers) for getting necessary permissions to use text contributions from others (e.g., when revising previous RFCs) is problematic when such permissions can't easily be obtained because: - it places unknown/hard to quantify future risk on the individual (who may or may or may not care) - by implication, it places future risk on their employer (who probably very much will care) One might hypothesize that some will say "this is silly" and just continue to submit documents without worrying much. Others (like those working for larger corporations) may well find that a general corporate policy will not allow them to take such steps (legal departments rarely issue blank checks for future unknown risk). Consequently, all cases will likely be treated as exceptions to be evaluated on individual merits and on a case-by-case basis. Anyone who has had significant interactions with legal departments on such matters will understand how problematic this would be in practice. There would be a huge discincentive to authoring work of this nature, and at best there would be (potentially lengthy) delays. Most likely, the pool of available authors would simply shrink. That would not be good for the IETF. Thomas _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf