Insurance (Re: The "late surprise" problem)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On 21. mars 2003 18:54 +0200 Pekka Savola <pekkas at netcore.fi> wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Christopher Allen wrote:
>> It was also mentioned that this group would need to fall under the
>> ISOC/IETF liability insurance, for no one wants to do a review if it may
>> open them to liability. I suspect your other SIRs proposal might also
>> need to fall under such insurance.
>
> I respect this, but somehow my naive little mind has trouble
> understanding  why you would be able to sue anyone because of expressed
> personal opinions  (which you're not paying for, as a consultant or
> whatnot).

unfortunately I have no trouble whatsoever imagining reasons why people 
would want to sue someone because of expressed personal opinions that 
affected the IETF standards process. And the US legal system (among others) 
has very close to zero protection against semifrivolous lawsuits - as long 
as the suer can spin a plausible story, it's even hard to countersue for 
harassment & damages, and the lawyers ALWAYS win.

The real protection of the IETF is that most/all participants want us to be 
able to continue to work; I think of the liability insurance as "protection 
against rogue players".

If (say) IBM or Cisco were *really* out to stop us using the legal system, 
and had no scruples that we could leverage to make them stop, we wouldn't 
stand a chance to continue working.

                            Harald