[ih] Who owns old RFCs ?

[Joseph Touch]

> On Apr 21, 2020, at 8:36 PM, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> On 22-Apr-20 14:34, Steve Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> FWIW, the ground rule for the earliest RFCs was unlimited distribution.
> 
> Fair enough, and that led to a pioneering open access policy, but
> those don't affect copyright, which I've always assumed for the early
> RFCs belonged to their authors, or - if their conditions of employment
> so stipulated - to their employers.

The changed happened sometime between 1997 and 2000.

> BTW, after a certain time all RFCs said "Distribution of this
> memo|document is unlimited". However, this was not included in
> the early ones, e.g. RFC768/791/792/793 make no such statement.

Unlimited distribution seems like it relaxes only part of a copyright. I.e., rights to derivative works, translations, etc. aren’t the same as “unlimited distribution” AFAICT.  The latter appears to imply “in total, unchanged”, again AFAICT.

Joe