[CWG-Stewardship] Proposed Principal Terms of IANA Intellectual Property Agreements

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 07:11:56PM +0200, Christopher Wilkinson wrote:
> Well actually, most of the IETF RFCs, were they to be in the commercial domain, would be assimilated to patents.

Were my grandmother to have wheels, she'd be a bus?  I don't know how
that counter-factual "were they to be in the commercial domain" helps
us think even a little bit sensibly about this.  The point of
standards is interoperability.  My employer doesn't donate my time to
the IETF because it's being nice.  It wants the Internet to work, and
"working" on a network of networks requires open standards that people
voluntarily adopt.  That's what it means to have an internet.

> Even the computer programs (that could be protected by copyright
> subject to the interfaces exception) would, in the US, be
> protectable by patents. Correct?

There is a big difference between standards and programs.  But in
fact, the IETF has a policy about included code snippets in IETF
documents.  They're required to have what free software people would
regard as a permissive free license (basically BSD-like).

I hope that helps, though I'm not totally sure I see why it's relevant
to this list or this topic.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com