Intellectual Property Rights in IETF Technology
RFC 3979, “Intellectual Property Rights in IETF Technology”, is a Best Current Practice document published in March 2005 by S. Bradner. It updates RFC 2026, RFC 2028. It obsoletes RFC 3668. It has since been updated by RFC 4879. It has been obsoleted by RFC 8179 — refer to the newer document for the authoritative version. The canonical text is published by the RFC Editor.
Abstract
The IETF policies about Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), such as patent rights, relative to technologies developed in the IETF are designed to ensure that IETF working groups and participants have as much information about any IPR constraints on a technical proposal as possible. The policies are also intended to benefit the Internet community and the public at large, while respecting the legitimate rights of IPR holders. This memo details the IETF policies concerning IPR related to technology worked on within the IETF. It also describes the objectives that the policies are designed to meet. This memo updates RFC 2026 and, with RFC 3978, replaces Section 10 of RFC 2026. This memo also updates paragraph 4 of Section 3.2 of RFC 2028, for all purposes, including reference [2] in RFC 2418. This document specifies an Internet Best Current Practices for the Internet Community, and requests discussion and suggestions for improvements.
What “Best Current Practice” means
Documents the IETF community's recommended operational or procedural practice rather than a protocol specification.
The canonical text of RFC 3979 is hosted at rfc-editor.org. Available in TXT,HTML.
- RFC 3978 IETF Rights in Contributions
- RFC 3980 T11 Network Address Authority Naming Format for iSCSI Node Names
- RFC 3981 IRIS: The Internet Registry Information Service Core Protocol
- RFC 3976 Interworking SIP and Intelligent Network Applications
- RFC 3982 IRIS: A Domain Registry Type for the Internet Registry Information Service
- RFC 3975 OMA-IETF Standardization Collaboration
- RFC 3983 Using the Internet Registry Information Service over the Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol
- RFC 3974 SMTP Operational Experience in Mixed IPv4/v6 Environments