On August 1, 2003, Todd Glassey's rights to post to the mailing list of the IPR working group were suspended for 4 weeks (until August 29).
In my opinion as area director, Todd Glassey's activities contained large
amounts of material irrelevant to the IPR WG, hsi postings were disruptive to
the search for consensus on the mailing list, and his behaviour was not
consistent with the behaviour we expect of IETF participants.
The WG chairs were completely justified in asking for the suspension of his
posting privilleges.
This document describes the events leading up to that suspension, as seen from the perspective of the responsible Area Director.
Most references are to the mailing list archives; these can be found at this
URL:
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/ipr-wg/current/maillist.html
Steve Bellovin's archive of warnings is available at http://www.machshav.com/~smb/tg/
May 6, 2003: Todd Glassey joins the IPR-WG mailing list
May 9, 2003: Todd Glassey sends his first message to IPR-WG (according to my logs)
May 2003: Todd Glassey holds an one-sided discussion where he argues that the IETF creates liability by not having signed copyright transfer statements on submissions, that "reciprocity" is legally defined by Black's law dictionary, and more.
May 28, 2003: Steve Bellovin warns (privately) that proposals to reorganize the IETF are out of scope for the IPR list, and warns against volume of postings (30% of list traffic). The warning is clarified in a second message of the same date.
June 2003: Todd continues. Sample quote (June 2, 2003 09:17):
Bert, So section 5 tells people what is what - I think that this is ridiculous and negligent in nature since it creates a liability rather than fixing one. The problems with the editors doing any editing to the drafts and the RFCs are that they are part of the work-creation and copyright release process then and it becomes impossible to testify as to what was submitted or its intent that way, and after all this IS supposed to be a standards process, so that means that the IP's that are submitted are complete otherwise the IETF's editors will have a further liability for their actions, unless perhaps that was your intent here.
June 8, 2003: Steve Bellovin, as WG chair, sends a public warning against crosspostings between the IPR and POISED lists, and against material irrelevant to the IPR list; specifically citing Todd Glassey's message entitled "FLAWS in the standards process".
June 9, 2003: Steve Bellovin sends another public warning, this time also citing threatening behaviour on the part of Todd Glassey (specifically referring to the message quoted above).
June 2003: Todd Glassey continues. Example (June 11, 2003 15:28)
I think that this is a problem Harald and you are right to point this out. The draft seeks to reinforce a non-commercial infrastructure only and I am concerned about antitrust from prohibiting commercial standards.
The term "prefer" is the problem. WG's are not political entities and they don't get preferences. They get operating guidelines that are organizational wide, as per being "Fair and Open". This is mandatory since WG's are vetting communities and not political in nature and what we are referring to is a organizational policy that is not set in the individual WG's but rather on an Organization Wide basis.
Not consistent with the way the IETF operates; WGs take decision.
Another quote - June 11, 2003 23:59:
Working groups don't get to adjust official policy on a case by case basis.
That's not what they are for. They are to provide Open and Fair environments for ALL their initiatives and that means that they MUST all be identical.
The same procedures must be used for all initiatives and these must be comparable to others or the words Fair and Open are meaningless.
June 12, 2003: Steve Bellovin warns again against off-topic postings, citing the group's charter, the limited scope of the current discussions, and the need to come to closure on the group's documents.
June 15, 2003, 10:33: Todd Glassey makes legal threats.
Keith, your counsel at the University of Tennessee will be hearing from me formally Monday. Your actions here are abusive and in fact constitute a tortuous interference with my attempting to bring some provable stability into this standards body, and its time the legal people at UTK get a real snapshot of what you are opening them up to.
Its time that the IETF's sponsors knew that they are going to be liable for what their people do here in this forum.
June 17, 2003: IESG discusses the proposed text of a suspension notice to Todd Glassey. After discussion, the IESG decides that a last warning will be sent.
June 20, 2003: Final warning to Todd Glassey is sent by the AD, after IESG discussion. Specific concerns raised are off-topic postings, massive amounts of postings, and threats of legal actions.
July 2, 2003: Steve Bellovin notes another off-topic Todd Glassey posting.
July 2003: Todd Glassey posts approximately 30 messages (a greatly reduced volume), most of which have some relationship to the topic of the WG, while still expounding a viewpoint that has no support from other working group members.
Quote from a message by Michael Froomkin (a lawyer):
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, todd glassey wrote:
[an enormous amount of legal-seeming rubbish]
July 29, 2003: Todd Glassey posts the following message, crossposted beetween the IPR and POISED working groups.
ftp://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-glassey-fairopen2026-00.txt
.My "fair and open" term analysis for RFC2026 is published. I intend to take this through RFC status so any response commentary no matter from who would be appreciated.
Todd
July 30, 2003: Todd Glassey posts the following screed:
David - the IETF does not get to judge what is and is not cool technology.
That makes it a Guild or Cooperative.A Standards Agency that claims to be "Open and Fair" means that there are no hidden or arbitrary processes. It also means that it does not apply one set of rules for one effort and waive or change that set of rules for its 'favored' efforts. And I believe that there are many here who have something to fear from an investigation into how the IETF does what it does.
Now is the entire IETF corrupt? No way, and has the IETF done some really incredible things? - You Bet, but the time is here for the rules to apply to all and to apply to all fairly and this means that many of the Fiefdoms that have been built now need to be merged into the Kingdom seamlessly and that means that the local Dukes therein are no longer in control.
July 30, 2003: Rob Austein asks Todd Glassey (pointedly) to stop posting off-topic comments.
August 1, 2003: Todd Glassey's posting privilleges are revoked.