Grant some rights to IETF trust

[sgillies]

The IETF needs some rights to GeoJSON. The way this works is that we grant rights to the IETF Trust and the Trust then grants them to the IETF. Which rights? See RFC 5378 sec 5.3:

5.3. Rights Granted by Contributors to the IETF Trust

To the extent that a Contribution or any portion thereof is protected by copyright or other rights of authorship, the Contributor and each named co-Contributor grant a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, world-wide, sublicensable right and license to the IETF Trust under all such copyrights and other rights in the Contribution:

a. to copy, publish, display, and distribute the Contribution, in whole or in part,

b. to prepare translations of the Contribution into languages other than English, in whole or in part, and to copy, publish, display, and distribute such translations or portions thereof,

c. to modify or prepare derivative works (in addition to translations) that are based on or incorporate all or part of the Contribution, and to copy, publish, display, and distribute such derivative works, or portions thereof unless explicitly disallowed in the notices contained in a Contribution (in the form specified by the Legend Instructions), and

Bradner & Contreras Best Current Practice [Page 10]  RFC 5378 RFC 3978-incoming November 2008

d. to reproduce any trademarks, service marks, or trade names which are included in the Contribution solely in connection with the reproduction, distribution, or publication of the Contribution and derivative works thereof as permitted by this Section 5.3, provided that when reproducing Contributions, trademark and service mark identifiers used in the Contribution, including TM and (R), will be preserved.

My interpretation of the CC-Attribution license on the GeoJSON spec is that the rights above are already granted. Does anyone disagree?

/cc @metazool @geojson/owners @geojson/contributors

[sgillies]

Great. Rights granted.

[crschmidt]

(I missed this when it first went by.)

Technically speaking, CC-By requires anyone who uses rights like the ones granted here to do so only if the user is doing so in line with CC license, which means that they'd need to display attribution in the form preferred by the copyright holder. The IETF grant does not maintain this responsibility.

I highly doubt that any copyright holder is likely to object to granting these rights, but it's not clear to me that CC-By is actually sufficient; that said, I think given the silence of the other authors on this front, it's reasonable to grant these rights to the trust in any case.

(My reading of CC-By may be wrong here, but that's how I'd read it.)

[sgillies]

@crschmidt thank you! I'll report back as soon as I hear from Mary Barnes. It may be that attribution is a blocker. If so, I take it that you would not be opposed to waiving it for the IETF Trust?

[dret]

thanks for following-up with these issues. i hope once this is resolved, we can get to the fun part of the whole exercise!