[ih] Internet History

[J. Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Craig Partridge <craig at aland.bbn.com>

    > "David P. Reed" writes:

    >> it would be interesting to determine when (I assume in the 1980's) the
    >> community of Internet architects decide that copyright was an
    >> affirmative tool in controlling who is allowed to know what about how
    >> designs proceeded?

It's not at all clear to me that this is the case even now, at least in the
IETF space. Copyrights are used there to prevent certain abuses, but there is
no attempt (that I know of) to prevent anyone from finding anything out.

(There are of course cases of private entities using copyright law to try to
control the spread of information, both in non-technical [e.g. Co$, Mormons]
and technical [uSoft] spheres.)

If you disagree, could you please say more about what data about this you
have, and how you're interpreting it?


    > I don't recall when copyright came into the picture -- I think that was
    > later and as an artefact of being in control of the documents (you had
    > to surrender copyright to the IETF).

Ahem. One doesn't surrender one's copyright to the IETF (sic - actually ISOC);
one merely provides them a license. The author still owns the copyright
intellectual property (unless of course the terms of their employment made
someone elsee's).

The ISOC produces a "derivative work" (legal term of art) which they control,
and they use their copyright on that separate work to control how the document
is used, solely (to date, at least) to prevent abuse - i.e. to make sure that
it's not re-published in an edited form which is claimed to be complete.

    > The Internet-Draft policy of having the document explicitly be ephemeral
    > was, as I recall, a tool designed to manage the standards process by
    > ensuring that ideas either progressed or died, but didn't linger.

Yes. It was also intended to prevent references to intermediate versions of
rapidly-evolving documents.

    > It was created pre-copyright days according to my (often faulty) memory.

Yes. I-D's had that characteristic at their inception (including the long,
un-sayable names), which predated the latest copyright stuff by many years.

(Although I seem to recall some discussion of how to prevent abuses back when,
but I don't recall what, if anything, was done to implement it.)

	Noel