Re: legal consultation (was List moderator action)

I think that I'm with the John Levine solution for this one.  Just stick the draft/idea on github and don't publish it to IETF as an ID.  I.e., I think that this is a workable solution for what is a very rare exception.

Then when you tell IETF about it you would need to clearly point out that you haven't published as an ID because you want to reserve your future rights and are just testing the water.  That to me is far more obvious than submitting an ID that has a minor change to the boilerplate that nobody ever reads (hence why one of the drafts got all the way to IESG review before anyone noticed that it was wrong).

As to why bother changing this: Because the IETF has too many rules, too much complexity and weird corner cases.  I think that we should be trying to simplify the process whenever possible and handle exceptional cases as genuine exceptions rather than having an extra codified rule for each of them.  For every exceptional rule, someone will try and find a way to leverage them in a way that they were not really designed for.  We collectively seem to have burnt a lot of time (and money) on this derivate rights, so I think it is time that we just got rid of it.

Kind regards,
Rob



From: Scott Bradner <[email protected]>
Date: Friday, 8 May 2026 at 17:13
To: Rob Sayre <[email protected]>
Cc: IETF discussion list <[email protected]>; Rob Wilton (rwilton) <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: legal consultation (was List moderator action)

if the number of published RFCs with the no derivative works language in
them is so small why are we even thinking about making any changes?
There does not seem to be a problem in that area to solve

the trial ballon case is, to me, more interesting and I'd like to keep that tool

Scott

> On May 8, 2026, at 11:58 AM, Rob Sayre <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> "Rob Wilton (rwilton)" <[email protected]>:
> > We publish lots of RFCs, a very tiny fraction of them use the no derivatives clause.
>
> I think the interesting case, which I want to preserve, is Internet-Drafts. I agree the RFCs are kind of a sideshow. As RFC 5378 puts it:
>
> "Occasionally a Contributor may not want to grant publication rights or the
> right to produce derivative works before finding out if a Contribution has
> been accepted for development in the IETF Standards Process."
>
> thanks,
> Rob S