--On Friday, September 07, 2012 15:54 +0900 Randy Bush <randy@xxxxxxx> wrote: >>> An I-D MAY be removed from the public I-D archive in >>> compliance with a competent legal demand. >> This leaves sufficient flexibility for the IESG to decide >> when a legal demand requires the removal and when it's bogus > > so the iesg will now spend their spring retreat in law school? > we have a test for competent legal demand. it is called a > court order. If the IESG persists in drafting statements, even proposed ones, that could expose the community to very large levels of liability (see earlier comments by myself and others about DCMA notices and assumption of liability as examples), then perhaps such a spring retreat would be a good idea. Sorry, but this is largely a problem of our own making. For years, our position was that I=Ds expired after six months and, when they expired, they disappeared from any public repository for which the IETF had direct responsibility. If others wanted to capture and keep copies forever, that just wasn't our problem. Indeed, it might be claimed that it violated our rules, but we weren't obligate to enforce those rules and knew that we couldn't. If we had stayed with that as a policy, the only thing we'd be discussing now was early expiration. We might not even be discussing that because it was widely assumed that the IESG had the authority to expire a document for any reason it thought sensible even though that authority was almost never used (A Good Thing, IMO). So now we have a public archive and the IESG feels a need to make comprehensive policies about that public archive. To avoid making rules about situations we can't anticipate, we say "only with a court order", which creates even more situations we haven't anticipated. Perhaps a spring retreat in law school or better and less expensively, a spring retreat in which ADs and selected other members of the community get to write thousands of times on a public wall "I am not a lawyer; I will not pretend to be a lawyer or even play one on television in the sight of the IETF; even if I were a lawyer, that doesn't make me an expert on copyright or patent law in multiple jurisdictions", :-( john