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On 6/16/2019 11:19 AM, Joe Touch wrote:
On Jun 15, 2019, at 10:53 PM, Michael StJohns <mstjohns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: On 6/14/2019 10:22 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:On 15-Jun-19 12:38, Joe Touch wrote:FWIW, IANAL but the agreements below affect only the editing and publication functions of ISI during the period indicated, which (AFAICT) was after Jon died.No, pre-October 1998 is specifically included in the first one. The two are slightly different for reasons that various lawyers no doubt explained at the time.I.e, this refers to the RFC Editor contributions. It does not appear (again, IANAL) to affect either previous works or even RFC work done by others during that period (granted that the ISOC started adding copyright statements to RFCs somewhere in that time too).It applies to all rights that ISI *might have had*, which is all they could offer. It doesn't apply to any rights that third parties might have had, obviously. So it is the maximum that ISI could offer, which is all we could ask for. (IANAL, but I was in the discussion loop with the Trust's lawyer.)FWIW, RFC768 would have been considered a work-for-hire by Jon on behalf of ISI, and ISI could then grant the rights wherever they wanted that wasn't inconsistent with the contract between ISI and the US Government that covered Jon's work.That may - or may not - be true for Jon, but he was staff at the time. It’s useful to note that this would not affect *faculty* at USC (other faculty elsewhere might have the same privileges); at USC, they have always been given rights to their research, except only when it is specifically identified as a product of a contract, in specific exception to “work for hire” copyright. Not exactly. If Jon had published RFC768 instead in a public journal or as part of a symposium submission etc, AND asserted copyright AND acknowledged the funding, he (or ISI depending on Jon's contract with ISI) would have owned the copyright - and that's the general way Faculty would get things out. For example compare and contrast the TCP and IP RFCs vs the papers written by Dave Clark, Vint Cert et al on exactly the same topic . It's not so much where you work as how you publish and what's in the contract. So, yes it would affect faculty if the deliverable was
specifications for the network. USC can't unilaterally waive the
FARs for the performers. Technical documents published to an (at the time) internal archival system for the use of other members of the community and where no copyright was asserted by ISI or approved by the Contracting officer wouldn't be in that category. Here's the paragraph in the FARS that would have been
incorporated in the contract (or something very similar to this).
Even if no approval was required, the FARS require explicit
assertion of copyright in the body of the work, and
acknowledgement of the funding support by the government - both of
which are absent in most of the RFCs.
(i) Unless provided otherwise in paragraph (d) of this clause, the Contractor may establish, without prior approval of the Contracting Officer, claim to copyright in scientific and technical articles based on or containing data first produced in the performance of this contract and published in academic, technical or professional journals, symposia proceedings or similar works. The prior, express written permission of the Contracting Officer is required to assert copyright in all other data first produced in the performance of this contract.
There are also other workarounds - e.g., hiring someone to write a book is work for hire; hiring them to investigate a topic and submit periodic progress reports - and having them write the book based on that research but on their own time - is not. The progress reports are work for hire - the papers are probably
not. If the contract requires the book, then all bets are off on
whether the book is a work for hire. And those two cases aren’t hypothetical; IANAL but they are based on direct experience at USC with the appropriate experts, FWIW. Joe Yup - but there's this real confusion about the difference
between IPR and copyright with respect to work funded by the US
Gov't. In the ARPA/DARPA contracts I funded (and before that the
NIC and BBN contracts I managed at the DDNPMO), the underlying IPR
was generally the property of the contractor, but the US Gov't got
unlimited paid up rights. The documents produced under the
contract and delivered to me or provided to the community were for
the most part free of originator copyright restrictions. They
weren't public domain per se, but absent an explicit claim of
copyright (which I think is still the case today even with changes
in the copyright rules), they could be treated as public
domain/government owned. During the term of a number of
contracts, various investigators published "scholarly works" in
public journals and asserted copyright over them - those
copyrights belong to the originator or to their employer and not
the US Gov't. Later, Mike
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