[cabf_governance] Ballot 206 and Official Version of the Bylaws

Ryan Sleevi sleevi at google.com
Tue Sep 4 09:43:58 MST 2018


On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 12:17 PM Dimitris Zacharopoulos <jimmy at it.auth.gr>
wrote:

>
>
> On 4/9/2018 5:58 μμ, Ryan Sleevi wrote:
>
> Could you explain the problem you're trying to solve?
>
>
> Not having all members sign a document for which they all agreed and voted
> for. Just like we do with the Bylaws. It creates administrative overhead
> (pinging representatives, sending reminders) for a case where 100% of the
> previous times, members agreed with the changes.
>
> Having an automatic implementation of IPR policy changes is a non-goal.
>
>
> It is not an automatic implementation of IPR policy changes. All members
> will be notified of the changes (that they have already agreed and voted
> on) and if they still disagree, they have a certain time to declare that.
> The result will be exactly as the one we have in today's Bylaws (Members
> --> Associate Members and Associate Members/Independent Parties -->
> Suspend).
>
> Banks and other legal organizations for which there are contracts,
> agreements and terms of use, have a process like this. I don't think the
> IPR policy, as a legal document, is any different. Of course, I could be
> wrong and I would like our legal experts to be able to provide some insight
> about this.
>

Again, as stated, this is explicitly been presented as a non-goal of
members. That is, any form of automatic IPR encumbrance, as proposed here,
is antagonistic towards and incompatible with continued participation.

I can understand why this might seem a performance optimization for smaller
CAs or organizations that don't generally pursue or possess IP, but as
we've seen, particularly among Certificate Consumers and those CAs that are
themselves held by larger organizations (due to the inclusion of
Affiliates), such a model is explicitly undesirable and incompatible with
participation.

More importantly, the 'problem' being solved here (of needing to re-agree
to the IPR Agreement) is one that we should not, as a matter of principle,
undertake to go through frequently. We just spent two years on reform in
order to ensure that our processes and policies provided the necessary
separation of risk and responsibilities in order to avoid such need, so I
fail to see how this is a valuable or useful problem to be solved.

Do you believe there is a problem with the current IP policy that needs to
be resolved, and that would thus necessitate resigning the agreement?
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