In reference to > Maybe the openness of the Internet owes a lot to this tradition. let me offer a comment regarding the RFCs. There might be a general connection, but there wasn't an explicit connection. The decision that RFCs would be freely available and without restriction regarding use came primarily from me. I was part of the team at UCLA, which together with our counterparts at SRI, UCSB and Utah developed the initial set of ideas about the Arpanet protocols. When we started to write down our ideas, we wanted to remove all barriers for publication and use. A participant from one of the institutions involved in the next round of connections, i.e., not one of the first four, expressed concern that his institution would require pre-publication review and approval, so we declared RFCs not to be "publications." There was no directive from DARPA or anyone else in the government nor was there even discussion about this policy. It was a pragmatic decision aimed at facilitating maximum communication with minimum overhead and minimum delay. We implicitly assumed there would be formal processes for the "real" documents later, and, of course, the RFCs were just a temporary expedient intended to last just a few months… I suppose if the course we set had been antithetical to the U.S. Government's wishes, we might have gotten some guidance to do something different, but I don't recall the subject ever coming up. We not only wanted the rules to be as unrestrictive as possible, we also wanted to spend as little time as possible discussing the rules. Steve On Oct 4, 2013, at 8:35 AM, Thierry Moreau <thierry.moreau@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote: >> One draft I'm working on [...] >> (Of course I haven't been able to check the copyright on [NIST documents ...) > > As a author of IT-related documents, you should be aware that, by its constitution plus long lasting tradition, the US government "works of authorship" have no copyright claims on them. The principle being that "we, the people" paid for a civil servant to make a write-up, nobody can claim intellectual property. Maybe the openness of the Internet owes a lot to this tradition. > > So, NIST documents can be used as if in the public domain. > > Bizarrely, the RSA and early public key crypto patents were filed precisely because US government funding was involved, but that's part of a longer story. > > Regards, > > -- > - Thierry Moreau > > CONNOTECH Experts-conseils inc. > 9130 Place de Montgolfier > Montreal, QC, Canada H2M 2A1 > > Tel. +1-514-385-5691