Re: [rights] RE: [rights-requirements] Silent Running

[Bob Glushko <glushko@SIMS.Berkeley.EDU>]

At 03:01 PM 9/9/2002 -0400, Reddy, Hari wrote:


> "2.    
> Expressing Rights: Any rights language should be able to express in a
> simple and straightforward way any rights in an intellectual property in
> standard XML syntax, such that any user with access to a text editor on
> any platform can avail themselves of the language. Such a rights language
> should be free of any restrictions on its use by any user by virtue of
> licensing, patent or copyright restrictions.",
>
> in our first phone conversation, I explained to you
> that I did not put the last part of the requirement into the matrix since
> it was contradictory to the charter that the TC voted on May 21, 2002 to
> accept a contribution as the basis of the TC's work which had an IP
> declaration associated with it. 

It seems that a lot is turning on a single word here -- namely, whether
XrML is "THE" basis for all of the work in this TC, or whether
it is "A" basis.  The former was in the charter that
Content Guard proposed, and the latter is what we accepted at the first
meeting.  I for one would not have participated here if all we were
doing was "tweaking" XrML, and I believe that goes for many
others who have committed lots of time to this effort.  

The minutes of the meeting are quite clear on this:

Content Guard submitted XrML 2.1 to serves as a starting
point for the work of the TC.

Vote was held to accept the submission from ContentGuard:
11 Yeas
1 Abstention
2 Phone votes unknown

Now this revision to the charter -- from
"THE" to "A" -- apparently seems unimportant to Hari
but to others it is an essential difference, because it makes the
question of the IP terms for the effort we produce here definitely in
scope.  It leaves open the possibility that other submissions will
be made to the TC as A basis for the specification that have different IP
restrictions than XrML does.   In any case, I do not believe --
nor does Karl Best of OASIS, who is the final authority on this --- that
the IP restrictions on a submission have any necessary relationship to
the IP restrictions on the ultimate work product of this TC. 

Karl said a couple of days ago:

In accordance with OASIS' philosophy of member-driven technical 
activities, the TC is governed by the majority of its members -- 
within the bounds of the normative OASIS TC Process and IPR Policy, of
course. The TC could ask ContentGuard to change the terms of its 
contribution. The TC could change its mind and reject the contribution
on the basis of the IP. The TC could complete the spec, including the
ContentGuard contribution, and have a spec that is part RF (the OASIS
part) and part RAND (the ContentGuard part) and leave it up to the 
implementors to decide how they will handle it. The TC could split 
itself in two so that we have two TCs working on digital rights, one
RAND and the other RF. All of the above is possible.



In any case, I think this discussion is premature.  We are not done
collecting requirements.  However, I think that the THE vs A issue
demonstrates to me that Hari is wrong to unilaterally determine that some
legitimately submitted requirements should not be recorded in a
requirements document.  

I especially think that given Bob DuCharme's recent suggestion about
conformance and a BasicRights standard extension being part of it, we may
have a way through this issue that doesn't require all of the drastic
measures that Karl Best has outlined for us here.

bob