[rfc-i] RFC citations committee I-D issued

[Joe Touch]

On 2/11/2011 6:44 PM, Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
> I wonder if you've talked to a patent lawyer, librarian or historian of technology about your position.

I have. They want the world archived. I don't.

> There is demonstrated value in being able to retrieve old ideas,
> even  if only for giving proper credit and keeping the patent trolls at bay.
> And non-preserved IETF mailing lists have made life more difficult in
> patent cases - I've been there.

I understand that value.

> The notion that an author would hesitate to commit an idea as an I-D
> because it persists more than six months seems pure conjecture. It would
> be useful to cite some evidence for this.

Tell, that was the logic behind what I-Ds are, and why they were deemed 
to disappear from online archives after a fixed period.

> In any event, any author who
> relies on that to protect his reputation or anything else clearly has a
> limited understanding of the persistence of I-Ds or anything else that
> is stored on somebody else's disk or indexed by Google.

And perhaps those who do have a limited understanding of copyright law. 
 From those I've talked to, the copyright reverts to the author after 
the 6 month period. At that point, those who use those copies for other 
than personal use are in violation of copyright law.

> Just because not all IETF mailing lists are preserved and not all
> I-Ds will survive forever means that deliberately destroying them is
> a good idea.

While I understand that we don't want to go around just trashing things 
randomly, the whole *point* of the I-D series is that things created 
therein *are* removed after a fixed period.

I.e., if that's not what the author intends, then I-Ds are the *wrong* 
place to submit them. If that's not desirable, e.g., for the IETF 
process, then let's create another series (ITRs - Internet Tech Reports, 
perhaps), and publish those as persistent, unedited documents, and let 
the author decide whether a pre-RFC document is distributed first as an 
I-D or an ITR.

But, IMO, let's not try to redefine what an I-D is.

Joe