Re: incubation in CGs and W3C Notes when a WG drops work on a spec - was: Re: Comments on https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/AB/raw-file/5508dec95a6a/tr.html

Wayne Carr (Intel) wrote:
>How does someone "take it back into a CG" if they don't have copyright
> permission for the changes that happened in the WG?

Michael Champion (Microsoft) wrote:
>Right, so lets fix that while we're revising the Process.
> I can't think of any reason why even the people who have been reluctant
>to liberalize the document license on Recommendations would oppose
>publishing Notes under CC-BY or the equivalent.

David Singer (Apple) wrote:

> Right, we could do that.  But Wayne, there are two cases here:  those
>that contributed the changed material want to see it published, whereupon
>they can contribute it again to the CG, or they don’t whereupon the
>question is moot.  If they don’t want to see it published, they probably
>won’t grant a license either, so making a W3C note with no IPR status
>doesn’t help.

Wayne Carr (Intel) wrote:

>Anyone can read 2 years of the mail list and try to figure out who
>contributed and go talk to each of those companies, but it would be nice
>to have something simpler than that since W3C already has the right to
>choose a copyright license for a Note.

note that while it might be easy to figure out the name/email
address/company which wrote an email at time X, figuring out who controls
that IP afterwards is much trickier:

0. Email addresses can stop working
1. People can die
2. People can disappear without dying (or be psuedononymous and cease to
respond, c.f. TrueCrypt and BitCoin)
3. Companies change their names
4. Companies get bought
5. Companies sell/reorganize
6. Companies "go out of business"

Trying to track IP through these mazes is really not a hell anyone should
be forced to venture into. Especially if there's some moderately
reasonable up front cost that people can pay to save everyone else from
this hell later (and the hell really does get worse with time).

* I haven't had time to figure out what document is being discussed, let
alone to read it, but I'm sure I'd like to.

Received on Thursday, 19 June 2014 23:18:29 UTC