11 May
2026
11 May
'26
2:55 p.m.
On Mon, 11 May 2026 at 13:40, Ralph Meijer <ralphm(a)ik.nu> wrote:
On 11/05/2026 13.48, Dave Cridland wrote:
[..]
Actually, an author can guarantee that they are in a position to assign
the copyright to the document to the XSF. By, literally, saying so.
This indemnifies the XSF entirely (as long as we ensure it's explicit,
which I believe we do) - as far as the XSF is concerned, we had the
copyright assigned to us by someone who warranted that they were able to do
so. Therefore, we believe we own the copyright in good faith.
[..] I would first and foremost suggest that AI generated text is just
one aspect of copyrightability and copyright ownership, and concentrate on
whether or not the submitter asserts they have the right to assign, and
have done so.
I agree with this point of view. It does not matter how the work was
authored or by what or whom. Making a special case for AI does not make
sense to me here, and may actually make it harder on the XSF.
Right.
[..] I would much rather require that assignment (and
the corresponding
assertion of ability) is made much broader, and covered for example this
message, and messages, comments, and so on in other XSF venues.
We discussed whether we should have a general Note Well, modeled after the
IETF's, before. Is that your suggestion here?
TL;DR: Yes.
We drift, somewhat, from the topic of the thread... But:
For those who are unaware, or who have forgotten, or don't care and wish we
weren't discussing this on standards, any IETF Activity begins by having
the Note Well text appear on a screen somewhere. If you join a mailing list
(and possibly on the mailman password reminders and similar), you'll get a
copy, and if you're at a physical or virtual meeting it is (or should be)
the first slide you'll see.
As I understand it, the IETF's Note Well operates as a "click through
licence" - "By participating here, your contributions falls under the
IPR",
very loosely.
However, the IETF's IPR is one based on licence (ignoring the patents area
for the moment, though that is important too for the XSF). I can licence
stuff to you (or anyone) just by saying I do; it's a unilateral action, and
so is quite convenient, legally. It's why the GPL was created as a
copyright licence, rather than a contract, despite it having some fairly
contractual-looking clauses in. They're broadly handled by all
jurisdictions where the Berne Convention is a thing - which is nearly the
entire globe.
The XSF operates on copyright assignment, however. Copyright assignments
are different in as much as under at least some jurisdictions (like the UK,
but also others) need a written, signed assignment. In some, assigning
copyright in advance of creation of the work has additional hoops to jump
through. The best way of handling assignments is by contract (for which a
consideration is required) or by a deed (which is the one with witnessed
signatures). We definitely don't want to do deeds, they're a pain.
As such, doing an assignment on click-through might work in some
jurisdictions - it looks to me like Germany, Italy, and France might all be
problematic, but the UK, US, and others might be OK. The ideal would be to
collect actual signed documents from participants, and gate participation
on having that document. We could do online signing to make that simpler,
obviously. It's not clear to me which jurisdiction we actually operate in,
for this, so it makes sense (to me) to make things as rock solid as we can
without getting in people's way too much.
But the advantage of an explicit, signed (equivalent) IPR agreement from
all participants is that not only is our copyright status rock-solid, but
we can properly address patents, which our policy is quite weak on -
loosely, it says that if we find any we'll hand-wave our way to a
replacement XEP. I'd rather see the IETF's policy or something similar,
saying that as particpants we will notify the XSF if we believe any IPR
claim affects a XEP, and that the XSF will distribute such notifications
but takes no view on their validity. This protects against stumbling onto
patents, but much more importantly it protects against "submarine patents",
where a participant deliberately introduces patent-protected concepts into
a XEP and keeps quiet about it.
It's possible all this is either wishful thinking, or simply too much work
to manage. But it'd be nice if we did it, I think.
Dave.