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Standards are about trademark, not copyrightStandards are about trademark, not copyrightPosted Jul 18, 2003 14:24 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)In reply to: RFCs - insufficiently free? by wa1hco Parent article: RFCs - insufficiently free? A standard is not a law. It is a definition. So the point of a standard isn't to prevent anyone from changing it, but just to provide a common name people can use to describe something. The SCSI standard doesn't say I'm not allowed to use 0xF2 as the read command on my scanner. It just says I can't call it a SCSI scanner if I do, which tells you not to buy it if you plan to hook it up to a SCSI host. So using copyright this way for RFCs is wrong. It means the author is using his copy right as a stick to maintain hegemony over the subject. By making it harder for someone to write a competing standard (he'd have to write it from scratch using his own words), he makes it less likely that someone will do so. Trademark law is the appropriate tool. You aren't allowed to refer to anything but the original RFC 821 as RFC 821.
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Standards are about trademark, not copyright Posted Jul 19, 2003 22:45 UTC (Sat) by pascal.martin (guest, #2995) [Link] Standard are contracts, not trademarks.Similar to a law or a commercial contract, a standard is the result of an agreements between parties. Changing that text nullify the agreement. BTW, if any text is free, there is no reason why I could not rewrite the Debian constitution myself and release it in the wild as the "latest version"? I am sure that would generate an interesting trail of emails :-)
Compare Posted Jul 21, 2003 16:59 UTC (Mon) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] That argument sounds a bit like SCO's claim that Linux users would be ableto erase "evidence" if they revealed what portions of the kernel they believe were "stolen". Being able to make a copy of something and change it does not mean that Especially if the copy is required to be called something different :)
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