--On Sunday, February 08, 2009 4:03 PM -0800 SM <sm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
... The new Contributor would like to say that the document contains Pre-5378 Material and he/she can only give rights for modifications within the IETF Standards Process. The new Contributor is unable to give any rights for non-IETF derivative works as that falls outside the Internet Standards Process.
Not quite, and I think this is where some of us are getting confused.
(1) The IETF should be utterly indifferent to what the new Contributor "likes", "wishes", or even "feels affection for".
(2) The new Contributor does not have discretion as to whether 5378 applies to the new parts of the work. It does. Full stop. The only question is when 5378 became sufficiently effective to be relevant to this.
(3) The submitting author (who will usually be the same person as the new Contributor) is simply unable to make any assertions at all about the rights to older material in the document other than that it is available for use in the IETF process.
(4) Your last sentence above would be correct if it said "...give any rights _to the complete document and all of its elements_...".
The key here is clearly what the submitting author(s) are "able" to do, not what they "wish", "elect", "would be willing to do if they could", etc.
This is not about the new Contributor "does not wish" or "elects" to withhold the rights as he/she does not have a choice in the matter.
yea, except that the new Contributor cannot "withhold" anything either. He or she can't even guarantee that 5378 rights are not available. All the new Contributor knows is the he or she doesn't inherently have those rights to grant the trust to grant to others.
john _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf