--On Thursday, 18 December, 2008 09:10 -0800 Lawrence Rosen
<lrosen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Cullen Jennings wrote:
>> Larry, your email sounded dangerously close to suggesting
>> that it might be ok to break the copyright law because no one
>> would object to it. Is that what you are suggesting?
>
> Not at all. But every attorney is charged with an obligation
> to help others understand and interpret the law even if that
> interpretation differs from that of some other attorneys.
>
> Fifty years from now, after IETF is dissolved and most of us
> have passed away, I don't want the dead hand of copyright
> reaching out from the grave to prevent anyone from freely
> modifying TCP/IP to satisfy modern requirements.
>...
> ...the notion that anyone owns and controls the functional
> underpinnings of technology by placing a copyright notice on
> it is simply unacceptable.
>...
> I hope that the participants
> in IETF develop IPR policies that support the fundamental
> freedom to invent--and to describe in words--whatever functions
> we need for our world to progress.
Larry,
Now I'm confused. To my weak, layperson's, mind, it appears
that you are conflating the underlying intellectual property in
TCP/IP (whatever, if anything, that means), or the "functional
underpinnings of [that] technology", with the copyright in the
form in which the protocols are expressed -- something that you
and your professional colleagues have repeatedly warned us
against.
I would assume that, if someone were revising TCP or IP fifty
years hence, they would end up creating new text, rather than
moving a lot of technical text forward, and that they would do
so for all sorts of technical reasons independent of copyright
constraints. The practical issues are very different from
tweaking an existing protocol only a decade or so out (or
somewhat more) to clarify it or change its maturity level...
and, of course, are different from the image of a cartoon mouse.
As an exercise that I don't have time to conduct, it would be
interesting to see how much of the text of the original IP
specification is still present in the IPv6 one... and that was
only 20 years and may, in retrospect, have involved too few
substantive changes.
> That is a perversion of the law, not something that a
> copyright lawyer who supports open source, open content and
> open standards can countenance.
Which is something about which you need to persuade the
Congress, not the IETF, as I assume you have tried to do.
john
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