[ih] Who owns old RFCs ?

[Joseph Touch]

> On Apr 21, 2020, at 9:15 PM, John Gilmore via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> I recommend that the IETF Trust assert that nobody owns the RFCs
> published before March 1989, and designate a period for anyone who
> claims a copyright in an RFC published between then and 1994 to approach
> the Trust to negotiate the claim,…


There’s still the period between 1994 and Oct 1998 (see below) to deal with, though. I recall the ISOC asking transfer of copyright for those works at some point, but not all were granted.

Also, note that not all DARPA contracts for work that generated RFCs explicitly indicated RFCs as a deliverable. NSF grants have no deliverables.

There is some information available at the RFC pages here:
https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/copyright.17Feb04.html <https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/copyright.17Feb04.html>

Note that this page links to a story about facts claimed to date back to 1988 that is not accurate; it implies that RFCs included an ISOC copyright statement before RFC2220 (Oct 1997), but they do not. Notably, that was exactly one year (to the month) before Jon’s passing.

Joe