Licensing Terms

Joint Statement of IANA and IETF Concerning Copyright Rights in the Protocol Registries dated 10 November 2021

Terminology. For the purposes of this statement, “IANA” means the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and its affiliate that performs the IANA functions, and “IETF” means IETF Trust, the body that manages intellectual property matters for the Internet Engineering Task Force. “Protocol Registries” means the technical protocol registry data directly linked at either https://www.iana.org/protocols or https://www.ietf.org/assignments/; it does not include any other material on or linked from those pages (e.g., the RFC documents that are linked on those pages are excluded).

IANA and IETF intend that the Protocol Registries may be freely used by any party for any purpose. Both IANA and IETF believe that the Protocol Registries consist primarily of factual information that is unlikely to be protectable as a matter of copyright law. However, for additional clarity, and to avoid any potential confusion about applicable rights, both IANA and IETF desire to (a) dedicate any applicable copyright rights that they may own in the Protocol Registries to the public domain, and (b) license any copyright or related rights for which they are a licensee (with a right to sublicense) to the broadest extent that they are permitted to do so. Accordingly, both IANA and IETF affirm that any applicable rights that they may have in the Protocol Registries are subject to the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 dedication found at https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode.

Disclaimer. While as of the date of this statement neither IANA nor IETF are aware of any third parties claiming intellectual property rights in the Protocol Registries, neither can guarantee that third parties will not do so. Further, the Protocol Registries are made available without any other sort of representation or warranty. The limitations and disclaimers found in the CC0 1.0 dedication are an integral part of this joint statement. For example, in no way are the patent or trademark rights of any person affected by CC0, nor are the rights that other persons may have in the work or in how the work is used, including data protection rights.

Last revised 2021-11-10.