[ih] Saving IETF history

[Karl Auerbach]

I have also been highly concerned about the tendency of modern tech 
history to erase its own records.

My concern may, however, be in a different direction.

I am concerned about the growth of specious patents.  There are a lot of 
patent trolls out there who buy-up weak patents that got past the 
relatively lax patent examiners in the US and elsewere, examiners who 
often have no notion of ideas in networking or computer systems, whether 
embodied in software or hardware.

By erasing our past we make it difficult to rebut these bad patents - we 
have discarded the evidence that the claims of those patents are neither 
novel nor non-obvious.

I think that over the last few years the IETF has done a spectacular job 
of organizing and tracking the RFC series.

However, we still have a tendency to forget the old when the newer, 
shinier thing comes along.

We should strive to make sure that our past is recorded.  And we ought 
to consider legal evidentiary requirements so that one who is 
challenging specious patents is not blocked by the complexities of the 
rules of evidence.

	--karl--


On 5/9/21 1:23 AM, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> Dave Crocker wrote:
>> Saving the RFCs is obvious.  What appears to be less obvious and, IMO,
>> is just as important in historical terms, is /all/ of the IETF-related
>> work materials.  Drafts.  Mailing list archives.  Session notes.
>> Everything.
> 
> John Day wrote:
>> Agreed. It should go somewhere. Same for all of the other standards
>> groups, forums, consortia, etc.
> 
> Re the IETF, look in:
> 
>    https://archive-it.org/collections/11034
> 
> A few years ago, I set up an Archive-It.org job to monitor the IETF's
> web presence.  I was disturbed at the deliberate ephemerality of the
> Internet-Draft ecosystem.  I had been looking back at a 10-year-old
> effort to eliminate some ridiculous restrictions on the IPv4 address
> space, and IETF had thrown away most of the relevant documents (though I
> found copies elsewhere once I knew their names).
> 
> Archive-It is a service of the nonprofit Internet Archive (archive.org).
> So, the Internet Archive's robots are now crawling (various parts of)
> the IETF websites every week, month, and quarter, under my direction.
> And saving the results forever, or as long as the Internet Archive and
> the Wayback Machine exist.  Between 1998 and now it's pulled in about
> 1.8 TB of documents, which are accessible and searchable either from the
> above URL, or from the main Wayback Machine at web.archive.org.
> 
> The IETF websites aren't organized for archiving.  I frankly don't
> understand their structure, so am probably missing some important
> things, and overcollecting other things.  But at least I tried.
> Suggestions are welcome.
> 
> Just be glad the IETF is copying-friendly.  Imagine trying to archive
> the IEEE or OSI standards development process.  Then imagine big
> copyright lawsuits from self-serving people who tied their income
> stream to restricting who can access the standards and the
> standardization process.
> 
> 	John
> 
> PS: Anyone or any institution can get an Archive-It account for roughly
> $10K/year.  The service automates the collecting of *anything* you want
> from the web for posterity.  (If you want them to, the Internet Archive
> will also write copies of it on new hard drives and send them to you for
> your own archival collection.)  About 800 institutions are customers today.
> You can also get a low-support low-volume Archive-It Basic account for
> $500/year.  Or get custom Digital Preservation services to improve the
> likelihood that your own curated digital assets will survive into the
> distant future.  See https://Archive-It.org .
> 
> PPS: The Internet Archive's long term survival is, of course, not
> guaranteed.  In particular, it will go through a tough transition when
> its founder eventually dies.  What is guaranteed is that they have built
> a corpus of useful information: Millions of books, billions of web
> pages, hundreds of thousands of concerts, decades of saved television
> channels, etc.  They are absorbing a lot of archival microfilm, too,
> including genealogical and census records, magazines, etc.  This corpus
> will likely motivate people to preserve and replicate it into being
> useful in the distant future.  They have tried to design the technical
> storage to encourage that result.  Does anyone here know anybody who has
> both the money and the motivation to make a complete and ongoing copy in
> a separately administered, separately owned organization?  That would
> significantly mitigate the long term risk of having all the replicated
> copies of the corpus owned by a single US nonprofit.  It would probably
> take a bare minimum staff of 10 people to run and manage such an
> operation, with dozens of petabytes of rotating storage in multiple data
> centers and a large collection of (mostly free) software keeping it all
> organized and accessible.
>