[ih] Saving IETF history

[Steve Crocker]

What was the relevant functionality?

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 12, 2021, at 5:44 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> In 2012-2013, I got involved as an Expert Witness in one of those huge
> patent lawsuits, which had by then been going through the legal process
> for about 30 years (!!).  One of the lessons learned was that although
> documentation is useful, the most valuable evidence is physical. 
> 
> In this case, I noticed (and amazingly remembered) that the ARPANET IMP
> program was a viable example of relevant "prior art", which is the holy
> grail in patent battles.   The ARPANET did what the patent covered, and
> did it well before the patent was filed.  But proving that such an idea
> was actually implemented and used almost 40 years earlier was the
> necessary task.
> 
> A huge effort ensued, driven by the lawyers and their clients, trying to
> find an old IMP and make it operable again, so that the "prior art"
> behavior could be demonstrated at trial before a jury.   No actual IMP
> was unearthed (at least one that could still operate), but an early-70s
> listing of the IMP software had survived in a basement.   After a lot
> more effort, that old software was brought back to life, running on an
> emulator of the old Honeywell 316 computer that was used as an IMP.
> 
> The particular behavior of the IMP that demonstrated the prior art was
> apparently never described in the documentation.   It only could be
> proven by looking at the code itself.  The old saying "The documentation
> is in the code" was exactly correct.
> 
> Bottom line - don't just think about documents, which can be
> insufficient to prove that something actually existed.   Software, and
> even hardware, is even better, at least for some patent fights.   It
> captures parts of history that never got into words.
> 
> For the curious, there's a good description of the "ARPANET
> Resurrection" here:
> 
> https://walden-family.com/impcode/imp-code.pdf
> 
> Look around page 33.   Also see https://walden-family.com/impcode/
> 
> /Jack Haverty
> 
> 
>> On 5/12/21 4:22 PM, Toerless Eckert via Internet-history wrote:
>> To put Karls conerns into a maybe easier understood (but theoretical) example for those on the list that have not been involved in practical instances of the problem:
>> 
>> - printed public/user product documentation from 2000 gets thrown out 15 years later because
>>  of "we need to get rid of all this old junk", maybe because of refurnishing offices.
>> - half a year later, a lawsuit with such a "bogus" patent that was filed in 2002 ensues.
>> - Obviously, the 2000 public/user product documentation would exactly show the patent
>>  claim to be "bogus" because the public documentation from 2000 explains exactly the same
>>  thing the patent filed in 2002 claimed to be novel.
>> - Online web page of the prior art product of course did not keep old version information reaching
>>  that far back, and even if it would have, it would not have date information on it, but only
>>  version numbers.
>> 
>> These type of things easily happen in multi-million dollar lawsuits over and over.
>> 
>> Going forwarding, IMHO, the best solution for e.g.: IETF documentation would be:
>> 
>> a) have all data such as all of datatracker and IETF mailing list archive in an easy mirrored access form,
>>   which i think we do not have, at least i have not found it, only for some subset of our data.
>> 
>> b) Have multiple, independent of each other mirrors around the world that would create
>>   signed/dated certificates for the hashes of each mirrored document - and keep old
>>   (versions of) documents and their signatures even when they would be deleted/changed on the origin site.
>> 
>>   Maybe those mirrors cost money, but IMHO worth it. especially for stuff like IETF whose overall
>>   volume on disk is laughable small. And this becam standard tooling, folks like CHM should be
>>   ideal places for such mirroring.
>> 
>> Without something equivalent to a/b i fear it is way too easy to create fake evidence for anything,
>> and the "evidence" may not hold up as well court as  the "good old printed evidence".
>> 
>> This "creation time" tracking in a more trustworthy fashion will of course not
>> work retroactively, which is why it would be even more important to understand the value of
>> doing this now, so someone starts doing it for the benefit of future bogus lawsuits for
>> stuff we start working on now. Especially given how paper already has disappeared as more
>> reliable evidence.
>> 
>> Cheers
>>    Toerless
>> 
>>> On Wed, May 12, 2021 at 03:12:43PM -0700, Karl Auerbach via Internet-history wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>> 
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