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W3C Objects To Royalties On ISO Country Codes
An anonymous reader writes "Tim Berners-Lee has sent a letter of concern to the president of ISO about the idea of collecting royalties on...guess what...ISO language and country codes! According to the letter, the ISO Commercial Policies Steering Group is proposing a royalty on commercial use of ISO language, country and currency codes. The whole idea seems absurd. On what grounds could uttering lang="en-US" be subject to any intellectual property right that justified any royalty demand?"
Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill- advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''
The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.
When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)
If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.
``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.
Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.
If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.
According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ for a counter-WIPO campaign.
The ISO complains of the cost of keeping a few databases... Something that is cheap to begin with AND would probably be done by others if necessary. Besides, ISO collects more than enough money from companies looking to get certification.
Evil, evil goatse troll. I just thought i'd warn everyone else. I'm gonna go wash out my brain and scorch out my eyes now...
Perhaps the following discussion would better help you understand just how fucked up IP & Copyrights have now become.
Why do you think we're all still running TCP/IP instead of the ISO/OSI protocol stack?
We're running TCP/IP because the CSRG decided to release BSD under a free license.
TCP/IP might be better than OSI, but we're not using TCP/IP for any technical reasons; we're using TCP/IP because it is the standard, it is the standard because everyone supports it, and everyone supports it because there was a free TCP/IP stack available for anyone who wanted it.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
You're right, but this proposal is an order of magnitude worse. Even if the ISO C spec is non-free, it is possible to write implementations of that standard which are free (GCC, TCC etc). If this proposal were to be followed, it'd be impossible to write open-source software which used ISO 3166 / 639 codes for countries or languages. This is especially problematic since they've waited for these codes to become widespread (e.g. as vital parts of the HTML, XML and POSIX standards) before saying they might have a problem with their free use.
This suggests to me that the proponent doesn't understand about free / open-source software, which is currently contributing hugely towards the very standardisation ISO is supposed to promote.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Or, was paid by the DoD to release it under a free, commercial-friendly license.
But back to the grandparent's point -- it's been said that the RFCs don't fully specify TCP/IP. That's why a "official" reference implementation like Berkeley helps adoption immensely.
We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes (usable according to their terms) for every language as part of the Ethnologue project, including artificial languages and sign languages.
As for country codes, I'm sure we can make something up. Just ask the leader of each country what they'd like for us to use for their country, work out the collisions, and compile our own standard (and issue an RFC).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Actuall, it's not dead,
it's just owned
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Actually, ISO invented 'GB' (Great Britain) for the UK. The UK code is 'Ukraine'.
The UK needs to pay infringement and back-licencing costs to ISO and the Ukraine.
Or, the UK has prima facia evidence that users were not selecting ISO country codes when assigning top level domains, just making up their own, independant implementations of a country name abreviating scheme.
But the SIL licence terms are too restrictive: you can't use their tables in an open source/free software program, because the SIL tables themselves are not freely redistributable: "You are not authorized to redistribute the downloadable code or mapping tables, whether in the exact form they were obtained from this site or in a modified form you have developed, without the written consent of SIL International.
Doug Moen.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The Fifth Meeting of the ISO Commercial Policies Steering Group (CPSG) was held May 12-13, 2003, at the New York offices of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Attending were representatives from 12 international standards bodies including Alan Bryden, Secretary-General of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
/. article is a little inflammatory, fairly inaccurate and that pretty much nobody has read the CPSG's statement.
The CPSG was created by the ISO Council in 2000, and serves as an advisory body to the Secretary-General; rather than a policy-setting body, the group offers recommendations to be forwarded to Council at the Secretary-General's discretion.
Among topics of discussion was the proposed development of a new business plan for working with the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC-1) and ways to build awareness and increase distribution of JTC-1 standards.
The CPSG also discussed the ISO 3166 country codes, ISO 4217 currency codes, and ISO 639 language codes and proposed clarifications for their distribution.
Noting the necessity for a number of ISO standards to be published as databases, the CPSG asked that the Secretary-General recommend a consideration of the publication of some ISO standards as such, and promoted studying related pricing, delivery, and maintenance issues.
The group also addressed the changing needs of customers in varied electronic environment, and looked at revising some distribution methods to better meet ISO customer needs.
The relevant paragraph:
Noting the necessity for a number of ISO standards to be published as databases, the CPSG asked that the Secretary-General recommend a consideration of the publication of some ISO standards as such, and promoted studying related pricing, delivery, and maintenance issues.
Perhaps I've misunderstood this, but this doesn't seem to be the ISO saying that they want to charge royalties on language and country codes. It is the CPSG saying that they want to study pricing issues related to publishing ISO standards as databases. It seems to me that studying the issues would include such things as taking comment on them.
It also seems to me that the whole
Even so, I'm with Tim Berners-Lee's position that collecting royalties on a commonly used standards seems self-defeating.
From the letter:
Make that ISO 4217 for the currency codes
Unselfish actions pay back better
I hate to open this can of worms, but you totally have the wrong spin on this subject.
While I will grant you that Unisys may have helped pay some very small part of the salaries of some of the originators of the LZW algorithm, you are stretching the truth quite a bit here. All that can be said is that at some point Unisys had the foresight to try to patent the algorithm and the USPTO was stupid enough to actually award it (not necessarily the fault of Unisys, but that is another story). From what I understand, IBM also patented the same idea, and there was also considerable prior art, not to mention the very shaky legal grounds that algorithm patents still stand on. Read up on that some time if you get a chance.
BTW, Compuserv did not originally license the "technology". The algorithm was published in a respected academic journal for Computer Science (I can't remember which one) which covered several other computing algorithms, of which the LZW compression algorithm was merely one of many articles. It was common for programmers to beg, borrow, or steal useful algorithms from each other (IMHO the sign of a good programmer anyway). We are not talking the copying of actual source code, but the the concept and idea, like the concept of a bubble sort or a quick sort.
The a couple of programmers at Compuserve saw the article, and liked the idea because they wanted to improve the ability to send graphic images to their users (or rather, even allow the capability). Remember, this was done in the days of the BBS systems when it was still common for 1200 baud modems. Of course, I remember when 1200 baud was considered a high-speed connnection. The GIF file format was in use well before the the world wide web. Several other data compression methods could have been used, but when the GIF standard was created it appeared as though the LZW algorithm was in the public domain.
The journal article didn't have any mention of any licensure requirements. Besides, it wasn't really practice (at the time) for programmers to seek licensure of an algorithm. In addition, at the time the GIF standard was created there was no simple way to search patents for violations. You litterally had to hire a law clerk to manually open patent abstracts and read each one. On paper. Sometimes you could find classified indexes to help with the patent search, but algorithm patents were so new at the time that even that wasn't commonly done because I doubt it had a classification code.
Also, you are forgetting the state of the art for graphic file formats prior to GIF. There were litterally hundreds of image file formats. Some compressed, some with different methods to store the image (usually a vector drawing format). Many were only monochrome images only. Every image processing application usually created their own propriatary format that was usually poorly documented (at best) and totally incompatable with other formats. Good conversions of data from one format to another often resulted in the loss of information, similar to converting a JPEG file to GIF.
From this mess Compuserve came in and offered the Graphic Image Format (GIF) for their customers, and in a philosophy that even Richard Stallman would approve, Compuserve offered the full published details of the format, to be freely distributed and copied without royalty (meaning the actual specification document...it was merely presumed that file formats themselves were freely distributable), and programmers were encouraged to develop software using the format. I believe it was something similar to the BSD license, but it later became free of attribution but still suggested. Keep in mind that Compuserve was at the time the 800 lb. gorilla in the computer industry, and as I said standardization of graphic images was just beginning to happen. Compuserve was treated as a hero, and due to the royalty-free nature of the format it was widely adopted. I can't remember a single graphic manipulation program that didn't support the GIF format pri