RE: ALERT -- IEEE stinks up the house! [Was Re: [vhdl-200x-ft] Ne w version of VHDL code]

Tim,

You may wish to familiarize yourself more with the IEEE P&Ps. You can get a copy of the IEEE-SA Operations Manual at http://standards.ieee.org/sa/sa-om.pdf <http://standards.ieee.org/sa/sa-om.pdf> . You will find that when the chair of the committee, Steve Bailey in the case of VHDL, submits the PAR form, they will sign the Copyright Agreement acknowledging that the proposed standard constitutes a "work made for hire." It may be that Steve has not reviewed these details with the VHDL Working Group. But then again, it may have been assumed that everyone participating in the standard has been given a copy of the P&Ps and have read or reviewed the chain of IEEE policies to understand this. Since this important point may be missed by all participating in DASC standards, I've cc'ed the DASC reflector.

I have extracted 6.1.1 from the IEEE-SA Operation Manual which states this requirement. Since no group wishes to do work on previously copyrighted material that is included in a standard, permission in the DASC standards has generally been secured at the beginning of the project. This is not a requirement, but certainly nobody wishes to waste their time to only have a contributor refuse to assign copyright.

6.1.1 Project Authorization Request (PAR)

As part of the initial PAR procedure, the committee or working group shall appoint a chair (or official
reporter) who shall sign a Copyright Agreement acknowledging that the proposed standard constitutes a
"work made for hire" as defined by the Copyright Act, and that as to any work not so defined, any rights or
interest in the copyright to the standards publication is transferred to the IEEE. Except as noted below, the
IEEE is the sole copyright owner of all material included in the standard.

At the time of PAR completion, any previously copyrighted material intended for inclusion shall be
identified. The working group is responsible for receiving written permission to use all copyrighted material
prior to RevCom submittal. Sample form letters are available in the IEEE Standards Style Manual.

Within the IEEE-SA Operation Manual, one will also find restrictions that are placed on a working group as to what it can accept during its operation. We all know that we never sign NDAs to participate in the standard committees and that the groups cannot accept confidential information or copyrighted information. This extends beyond what is placed into a draft standard and includes such things as email, but is broad to include any communication. The relevant clause to reference is 4.1.1.5. Again, a working group can incorporate copyrighted material in a draft, but before it is approved by RevCom, copyright release and/or assignment is required. As I have seen the DASC operate in the past, these copyright releases and assignments are generally made in advance of approval so the owner cannot hold a standard hostage at the end of the development process.

4.1.1.5 Confidentiality Statements and Copyright Notices on Communications

The IEEE-SA Standards Board and its committees operate in an open manner. To that end, no material
submitted to the IEEE-SA Standards Board or its committees will be accepted or considered if it contains
any statement that places any burden on the recipient(s) with respect to confidentiality or copyright. Any
communication, including electronic mail, containing language with such restrictive wording will not be
accepted or considered.

It should be noted that this policy does not apply to IEEE copyrighted materials, such as draft standards. In
the event that copyrighted materials are to be incorporated in an IEEE standard, an acceptable copyright
release or assignment must be obtained from the copyright owner prior to approval of the standard by the
IEEE-SA Standards Board.

I would also like to clarify the status of eda.org. eda.org is owned by Accellera and operated for the good of industry and the public to foster standards development. In addition to paying to keep the site active and accessible, we are grateful for the numerous sysadmin volunteers, Sun Microsystems for the donations of hardware for over a decade, the IBIS team for additional disk storage and Stanford University to allowing us to keep the machine located at their campus. (Accellera does pays Stanford for network connectivity, power, etc.) We maintain a long-standing relationship with the IEEE Standards Association, IEEE Computer Society's Design Automation Standards Committee, IEEE Circuits and Systems CANDE group, Geneva based IEC TC93 groups, the Electronic Design Process Subcommittee (EDPS) of the IEEE Design Automation Technical Committee (DATC), and more who have located groups at this website. Accellera would not want this site abused by anyone to circumvent the established practices of these well
 respected groups.
 
From this email, and other messages to the VHDL reflector and DASC reflector I sense a great deal of frustration on standards development. We all benefit from standards. Consumers are offered choice of interoperable solutions, competition is based on features, price, implementation, etc. and an assurance that your data is portable and in a format not controlled by a single vendor. I can only imagine what design life would be like if we went back to the pre-EDIF days when every company had their own format and design data was barely interoperable.
 
I stand by my previous email that a conversation with the IEEE-SA is more in order to explore options.
 
And, this is one of the reasons I believe corporate/entity participation in the DASC standards groups is a benefit. The DASC has very weak business connections to the IEEE-SA. I have attempted to broaden this line of thinking in the DASC and I understand it resulted in a religious war.
 
Regards,
 
Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vhdl-200x-ft@eda.org [mailto:owner-vhdl-200x-ft@eda.org <mailto:owner-vhdl-200x-ft@eda.org> ] On Behalf Of Tim Davis
Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 8:35 PM
To: David Bishop
Cc: Peter Ashenden; vhdl-200x-ft@eda.org; John Cooley
Subject: ALERT -- IEEE stinks up the house! [Was Re: [vhdl-200x-ft] New version of VHDL code]

David,

You should immediately, and without reservation, place your own copyright on every single one of those files which you personally created. Especially the floating point work developed for both Verilog and VHDL.

IMMEDIATELY (with emphasis)

Then repost them on the public, non-ieee EDA.ORG web server as a giant zip file (or even better post them to Sourceforge). As far as I know, you haven't published the code directly to the listserver and EDA.ORG isn't owned by the IEEE. Let the IEEE lawyers come forward. I think they would promply loose their case and perhaps 50% of the IEEE membership after they are found guilty of attempting to steal your hard work for their own profit.

These are not a work made for hire and the IEEE has absolutely no rights in them. If this Claudio Stanziola person continues with this reprehensible line of Bulls**t then I think every single one of us should drop our IEEE membership on the spot, write editorials to all the major EE magazines, and generally scream FOUL at the top of our lungs.

In the event that Mr. Stanziola believes me to be wrong on this point then I challenge him to publish the contract with your signature on it stating that you are developing materials for them in a work made for hire and have turned over copyrights to them for your intellectual property.

--
Aspen Logic, Inc.
by: Tim Davis, President
David Bishop wrote:
> Peter Ashenden wrote:
>
>> David and colleagues,
>>
>> I received a note from Claudio Stanziola, the IEEE-SA's IP and legal
>> person,
>> regarding the posting of the package files.  He indicated that public
>> posting of IEEE copyrighted material is against IEEE policy, and
>> requested
>> that the material be kept in a protected area.
>
>
> I feel very strongly that these packages NEED to be part of the public
> domain.  If they are not, all of our hard work on VHDL-200X-FT won't
> get used.  The reason that it took "numeric_std" so long to be
> adopted was because vendors did not have free access to the source code.
>
>> I've asked him for clarification of what kinds of material should be
>> protected and to whom the material should be accessible.  I'm still
>> awaiting
>> a reply.
>
>
> Please.   I feel that I have made a major mistake in donating the
> fixed point and floating point packages if this is the case.
>
>> Meanwhile, please be aware that we may be required to take action to
>> limit
>> access in some way.  I'll advise as soon as I can.
>
>
> Limiting access may make it impossible to actually verify these packages.
> I have several thousand lines of test vectors, just for the updates to
> the current packages, and they are not exhaustive.  We will need to make
> them publicly available not only for debugging, but to get them used and
> our new standard accepted.
>