Re: Copyright status of early Internet RFCs

I always point people to the wonderful chart created by Peter Hirtle for questions about public domain:

    http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/training/Hirtle_Public_Domain.htm

I think a big question for this particular set of documents is whether they would be termed "published" or "unpublished" for the purposes of determining their copyright status. Although they are on the WWW today, which is very public, when they were first created they were only sent to a small number of participants on a small, rather closed network. So if being on the WWW makes the works "published" they may not have been published until around 1990 or later. That gets you to the line in Peter's chart that reads: " Unpublished works created before 1978 that were published after 1977 but before 2003", to which he says there: " Life of the author + 70 years or 31 December 2047, whichever is greater."

Now, if they could have been considered published at the date they were written, say in 1976, then they would be in the public domain. If they are still considered unpublished today, then the rule is "120 years from the date of creation". The earliest RFC's are from 1969. That would mean 2089.

Or at least, that's how I read the chart.

kc

John Levine wrote:
> A friend of mine wants to republish some early documents in the
> Arpanet/Internet RFC series in a book. The ones he is interested in
> are all from before 1976, and none contain any copyright notice. (The
> latter is easily verified by searching the online versions for the
> strings "copyright" and "(c)".) They're by many different authors,
> some were produced under DARPA contracts, but I don't think all of
> them were. There is a tradition that reproduction is permitted, but I
> can't find that codified anywhere. The guy who edited the series at
> the time has died, so we can't ask him. Later editors of the RFC
> series have apparently made retroactive claims about earlier
> documents, but I get the feeling it's people who know more about the
> IP protocol than about IP law playing Junior Lawyer.
>
> My understanding is that if something was published in the U.S.
> before 1976 without a notice, it's P.D. Is there any reason to
> think he can't just go ahead and republish?
>
> TIA,
> John Levine, johnl[_at_]iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
> "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.
>
>
>
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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