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Obscure license of RFC1436



Hi folks,

During the non-free-RFC purge, the question of the license of RFC1436 has 
arisen.  In the forwarded message below, you can see that it does not bear 
an IETF copyright and states "Distribution of this memo is unlimited."  
However, Simon has raised some questions about the Berne Convention, which 
are frankly beyond my level of expertise.  Any opinions here?

-- John
--- Begin Message ---
John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:

> On Thu April 10 2008 7:45:33 am Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> Severity: serious
>> Package: pygopherd
>> Version: 2.0.17-0.1
>> User: debian-release@lists.debian.org
>> Usertags: nonfree-doc rfc
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> This source package contains the following files from the
>> IETF under non-free license terms:
>>
>>   pygopherd/_darcs/current/doc/standards/rfc1436.txt
>>   pygopherd/doc/standards/rfc1436.txt
>
> Are you sure?
>
> That file states:
>
> Status of this Memo
>
>    This memo provides information for the Internet community.  It does
>    not specify an Internet standard.  Distribution of this memo is
>    unlimited.
>
> It does not bear an IETF copyright, either.
>
> This does not appear to be the license that the linked resources complain 
> about, and in fact they state that older RFCs appear to be DFSG-free.

Hm, I checked more carefully, and it seems RFC 1436 was published during
the (legally interesting) time frame after the US signed the Berne
convention (1989) and before the IETF started adding copyright notices
and adding a license.

The older RFCs referred to by that link, that may be in the public
domain and thus acceptable, are those published before 1989.

So RFC 1436 can thus not be claimed to be in the public domain since it
was published after 1989.  Right?

Thus, it needs to have a copyright notice and be released under a
DFSG-compatible copyright license.

I don't think the above license is DFSG free, but I can't find a
discussion about it.  It doesn't look like a copyright license at all to
me, and in particular doesn't grant you the right to make modified
copies.  Maybe we could bring it up on debian-legal?

Thanks for quick reply!

/Simon


--- End Message ---

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