Proposal: Create a Legal Advisory Group

[othermaciej]

Some matters that come before the Steering Group may benefit from legal review or advice, particularly matters related to copyright and patents. While SG members can privately consult with attorneys for their own organizations, it seems better to have a designated official group that the SG can consult collectively. This group would be similar in purpose and function to the W3C Patents and Standards Interest Group. While their existence and membership would be public, many of their deliberations may be private, as that is the norm when it comes to attorneys discussing legal matters.

I think the best way to set this up is for the SG to ask the attorneys that helped with the creation of the Steering Group to draft a policy document that would describe the operation of the LAG. It's probably best for Lawyers to figure out their own work mode instead of technical/engineering/standards folks trying to figure it out for them. Once they have a draft, the SG would review it, give feedback, and eventually adopt it.

Assuming other SG members are amenable, I will kick off a private conversation soliciting a draft of a WHATWG Legal Advisory Group Policy.

[vfournier17]

SGTM. What do others think?

[michaelchampion]

How would the membership be determined, beyond attorneys for SG companies? Could Participant companies send a representative, for example (as any Member can to the W3C PSIG)?

[michaelchampion]

I guess @othermaciej addressed that in the proposal: We'd let the attorneys draft a policy document and see what they come up with rather than trying to constrain them in advance.

[othermaciej]

For the sake of anyone watching this issue... we have been discussing a proposal privately. It will end up on the record once it is more fully baked.

[othermaciej]

Further progress update: we've internally reviewed a draft, but some issues remain to be discussed.

[foolip]

The attorneys have discussed this, and the feedback I got from Google's attorney was that it isn't clear that the change would move the needle enough to make incorporating worth the time and effort, and most legal issues are probably dealt with in a sufficient manner as they are. I agree with this. Even though a bunch of issues with legal implications haven't moved fast, I think it's still on the SG to move them along, and making public the group that we consult wouldn't itself change how or how fast we operate.

However, this issue was created before my tenure on the SG, and I haven't seen the internal draft referenced in #54 (comment). Removing the "needs legal input" label and adding the agenda label so we get to this in a following meeting. It would be useful if other @whatwg/sg folks could check in with their attorneys before then.

[othermaciej]

@foolip and I discussed this briefly on the SG call. We thought maybe instead of doing a full formal definition of this group, or else not documenting it at all, we could loosely specify in the SG Policy that the SG may from time to time consult with legal representatives for their companies. That way we wouldn't put a lot of effort into something that is actually not a problem, but also would not leave this part of the WHATWG's functioning as a total mystery.

[annevk]

I created #159 to address this using the above comment as guideline.