Re: Draft IESG Statement on Removal of an Internet-Draft from the IETF Web Site

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--On Wednesday, September 05, 2012 11:32 -0700 Ted Hardie
<ted.ietf@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> For third party requests to remove others' independent
> submissions, I think there should be a pretty high bar.  "Open
> submission" is a key part of "open standards", in my opinion,
> and if it becomes overly easy to cause submissions to be
> removed, we run risks to our process that I think are worse
> than the added load on the IESG.  If you were replying only in
> regards to first-party requests, than, as I said, I'm fine
> with the moral equivalent of early expiry.

I agree about the third-party requests.  If people have to
resort to legal process for them, I'd lose no sleep over it.  On
the other hand, a removal request from a WG Chair or AD for a WG
document isn't really third party, nor would be corresponding
actions by the IAB or IRTF for documents created at their
request.

> The only reason I can see for making third party removal of
> public, non-expired I-Ds be at the discretion of the IESG,
> rather than requiring a court order, is that someone could
> attempt to publish patently offensive material in an I-D as an
> attack.  Forcing us to pay the legal fees for a court order
> would be a potential DoS, as someone up-thread noted.  If it
> weren't for that, I would support court order only.

I more or less agree, but remember that a DMCA takedown request
is not a court order but has a certain amount of legal standing
in the jurisdictions in which the Secretariat, most of the
servers, the IAD, the IETF Trust, and ISOC are subject.  One
(IANAL, so not necessarily completely accurate) way to
characterize it is that it lets a recipient (potentially the
IETF) distinguish between "we just provide the service of
posting I-Ds but are not responsible for their content" and
"these are documents for which we are willing to accept
responsibility (for copyright clearance as well as conformance
with other laws)".  As long as we are willing to say "anyone can
post anything they like as I-Ds, with no prior review by 'the
IETF'", we had best decide we are a service provider and be
willing to take down on that basis -- or we better schedule the
budget increase to cover liability for copyright violations when
some third-party posts potentially infringing material and we
accept responsibility by ignoring the DMCA notice.

Again, really expert legal advice is in order here. I'm
certainly not trying to give it, but this discussion is getting
pretty far out in the weeds without that advice.   If the IESG
has already obtained it, I wish they would tell us.

   john



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