On 25 mei 2010, at 20:17, todd glassey wrote: > The IETF does NOT own the underlying license rights to TCP/IP in ANY WAY. > For the record TCP/IP actually probably still belongs to the US > Government as it was originally produced under a Department of Defense > contract with BB&N about 40 years ago and nothing about its ownership > has ever been handed over to anyone that I know of. Interestingly, RFC 793 doesn't appear to have any copyright claims. I'm not sure when it stopped being necessary to have one of those in order to be granted copyright in the US. I'm not sure though how many rights one can hold to a protocol separately from the copyright on the specification. Obviously independent implementations don't violate any copyrights, and I'd be surprised if there were trademarks or patents on TCP. If those ever existed, the trademark obviously wasn't defended and the patents have expired. (BTW TCP, IP and family are from ~ 1981, postdating the original ARPANET NCP protocol by a decade.) _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf