DNS Copyright and License prefixes
draft-wallstrom-dnsop-copyright-prefix-00

Abstract

The content of a typical zone file is lacking information on the copyright and license from which the content of the zone file is available. The typical use is to make a zone file available after an agreement on use (license) has been made. When the zone file is publicly available through DNS, there is no way of signalling the copyright ownership or any end user license of the content. This document describes two prefixes for handling this using the TXT RR type, _copyright and _license.

Status of This Memo

This Internet-Draft is submitted in full conformance with the provisions of BCP 78 and BCP 79.

Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. The list of current Internet-Drafts is at http://datatracker.ietf.org/drafts/current/.

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This Internet-Draft will expire on November 11, 2016.

Copyright Notice

Copyright (c) 2016 IETF Trust and the persons identified as the document authors. All rights reserved.

This document is subject to BCP 78 and the IETF Trust's Legal Provisions Relating to IETF Documents (http://trustee.ietf.org/license-info) in effect on the date of publication of this document. Please review these documents carefully, as they describe your rights and restrictions with respect to this document. Code Components extracted from this document must include Simplified BSD License text as described in Section 4.e of the Trust Legal Provisions and are provided without warranty as described in the Simplified BSD License.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 1.1. Reserved Words
• 2. The _copyright prefix
• 3. The _license prefix
• 4. Security Considerations
• 5. IANA Considerations
• 6. Acknowledgements
• 7. Informative References
• Author's Address

1. Introduction

A zone file is typically not available to an end user in its entirety, but rather accessed only through DNS lookups. AXFR and other methods for accessing the complete content of the zone file is often prohibited.

For clients and applications that wish to use the zone file for purposes other than DNS lookups, adding the copyright and license information to the zone file itself is useful.

This document describes two prefixes for handling this using the TXT RR type, _copyright and _license. A client that looks up these records in a zone can determine the copyright owner and the license of the content of a zone.

The use of an underscore prefix is based on the work on [I-D.ietf-dnsop-attrleaf].

1.1. Reserved Words

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2. The _copyright prefix

The _copyright record is published in the zone using the DNS TXT resource record type.

The RDATA for the _copyright resource record is textual in format using the following template:

copyright IN TXT "Copyright (C) YEAR Your Name or Organization"

The copyright applies to the specific zone of where the _copyright TXT RR is found. The copyright itself is a sui generis database right that covers the complete zone content, or larger portions of it where this type of copyright law applies.

3. The _license prefix

The _license record is published in the zone using the DNS TXT resource record type.

The RDATA for the _license resource record is textual in format and is a HTTP URL leading to the full license text represented in either plain text or HTML. Example:

license IN TXT "https://www.example.com/license.txt"

4. Security Considerations

This document has no security considerations (yet).

5. IANA Considerations

The prefixes described in this document might be published by the IANA registry described in [I-D.ietf-dnsop-attrleaf].

6. Acknowledgements

Thanks go to Dave Crocker, John R Levine, Roger Murray and Jakob Schlyter for input on the content of this document.

7. Informative References

Author's Address