Technical Summary
The IETF policies about intellectual property rights in Contributions
to the IETF are designed to ensure that such Contributions can be made
available to the IETF and Internet communities while permitting the
authors to retain as many rights as possible. Of course, Contributors
grant some rights to the IETF. The IETF trust holds and manages those
rights on behalf of the IETF. The Trustees of the IETF Trust are
responsible for that management. This management includes granting
the licenses to copy, implement and otherwise use IETF contributions,
among them Internet-Drafts and RFCs. The Trustees of the IETF Trust
accepts direction from the IETF regarding the rights to be granted.
draft-ietf-ipr-3978-incoming (destined for BCP) details the IETF
policies on rights in Contributions to the IETF. It also describes
the objectives that the policies are designed to meet.
draft-ietf-ipr-outbound-rights (destined for Informational) describes
the desires of the IETF regarding outbound rights to be granted by the
IETF Trust in IETF Contributions.
Working Group Summary
This document is the product of the IPR Working Group.
The most contentious part of the debate was on whether or not to
freely allow the production of modified versions of the material
outside the IETF context. The rough consensus was that code has to be
modifiable in order to be useful, while the arguments for allowing
modification of prose text were not compelling.
Protocol Quality
The documents were reviewed by the IPR Working Group and by IETF
counsel.
The documents were reviewed by Russ Housley for the IESG.
RFC Editor Note
These documents will not come into force until it is published as an
RFC. The IETF Trust is in the final stages of approval for the
license agreement that meets the requirements contained in these
documents. The IETF Chair or IETF Trust Chair will provide the URL;
however, the RFC numbers for these documents is needed for the
license agreement. Coordination is needed to ensure that these
documents come out together.
Please add the followinf title page header lines:
Obsoletes: 3978, 4748
Updates: 2026
In section 1, item k should include a more encompassing definition
for "RFC":
OLD
k. "RFC": the basic publication series for the IETF.
NEW
k. "RFC": the publication series used by the IETF among others.
Section 4 should not limits rights assignment to "IETF Standards
Process", rather it should address all "IETF Processes" since not all
of the work in the IETF is about creating standards. For example,
some of the work in the IETF is about process change.
OLD
4. Non-IETF documents
This document only relates to Contributions made as part of the IETF
Standards Process Other documents that are referred to as Internet-
Drafts and RFCs may be submitted to and published by the RFC Editor
independently of the IETF Standards Process. Such documents are not
covered by this document, unless the controlling entity for that
document stream, as described in [RFC 4844] chooses to apply these
rules. Non-IETF Contributions must be marked appropriately as
described in the Legend Instructions. See the RFC Editor web page
for information about the policies concerning rights in RFC Editor
Documents; for other document streams, the controlling entity must be
contacted. See Section 11 for a declaration from the IAB on this
matter.
NEW
4. Non-IETF documents
This document only relates to Contributions made as part of the IETF
Processes. Other documents that are referred to as Internet-Drafts
and RFCs may be submitted to and published by the RFC Editor
independently of the IETF Standards Process. Such documents are not
covered by this document, unless the controlling entity for that
document stream, as described in [RFC 4844] chooses to apply these
rules. Non-IETF Contributions must be marked appropriately as
described in the Legend Instructions. See the RFC Editor web page
for information about the policies concerning rights in RFC Editor
Documents; for other document streams, the controlling entity must be
contacted. See Section 11 for a declaration from the IAB on this
matter.