Subject: Re: IETF legal boilerplate

From: Russ Allbery <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:56:41 -0800

For the rest of the group, we think that this issue is now resolved.

Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]> writes:

> In this case, my understanding of copyright law would say that if
> Charles or Henry Spencer were to object to submission under RFC 5378,
> they would have standing to do so; the requirement from RFC 5378 that
> they have "materially and substantially" contributed would leave most of
> the rest of us without a copyright to assert.

That I think is the main call that needed to be made, and that I wasn't at
all sure how to make.  That's a tractable set of people; I was worried
that the definition of substantially would cast a much wider net.  A lot
of people have offered wording suggestions.

> Understood. Since the only person left to do the bookkeeping is the WG
> chair, I guess it's my job.

Thank you very much for taking this on, and I'm sorry to have dumped it in
your lap.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email-masked])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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From: Ralph Babel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 18:07:52 +0100 (CET)

Russ Allbery, quoting some IETF legalese:

> [...] the Contributor and each named
> co-Contributor grant a perpetual, irrevocable,

This is likely to be incompatible with § 42 UrhG
(section 42 of the German copyright law), possibly causing
problems for contributors subject to German jurisdiction.

> [...], royalty-free, [...]

This, too, is difficult terrain: see § 32, § 32a UrhG.

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:31:24 +0100

> This, too, is difficult terrain: see § 32, § 32a UrhG.
Ralph, can you summarize the difficulty to the IPR list or to the IETF list?

I haven't seen an incompatibility with German law raised before.

                   Harald