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?"

Comments

Abolish "intellectual property".

[Thinkit3]

"Intellectual property" is a silly and stupid idea. Cases like this only illustrate more obviously how bad an idea it is. It should be abolished as soon as possible.

Re:Abolish "intellectual property".

[cperciva]

No, cases like this illustrate that allowing "stealth IP" is a bad idea.

If ISO had said from the start "we own these country code standards, you'll have to pay if you want to use them", we wouldn't have a problem -- nobody would be using them. The problem arose only because ISO waited until after their standard had been widely adopted before mentioning the issue.

Re:Abolish "intellectual property".

[Anonymous Coward]

If you obtain them without stealing the paper I've written then on, go ahead. The paper is real property.

Re:Abolish "intellectual property".

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing stealthy about this; they simply changed their minds, which, given that you still want "intellectual property", they can do, because it's their "property."

I, myself, don't want intellectual property in the form that it has taken--that the primary beneficiary of the property is the temporary owner of the idea or work. Intellectual property was suppose to indicate the intangible ideas that are given short-term government protection. The idea, like land, in and of itself does not have worth; it's the creation of the idea, the implementation, the effort, like working the land, which creates value.

Intellectual property initially was the term to describe that value. However, it's become more a term singularly synonymous with physical property, when ideas and creative works are distinctive different than physical property.

The mere fact that ideas can lead to economic gain is one thing. That ideas themselves, not the execution of an idea, are owned and property is a problem. That is what the ISO wants.

Re:Abolish "intellectual property".

[LostCluster]

It also seriously undermines the whole point of the ISO. The idea is to create standards that everybody will use so that we can communicate with each other. If there's a price with such systems, then clearly somebody will balk at the price and create an alturnate, and then somebody will think any price is too high and we'll get a GNU/Whatever version of the same thing.

If the ISO starts treating its standards as IP, then ISO standards will cease to have value.

How long ...

[El Cubano]

How long until you need to get license for your child when he is born so that he can speak his native language? How about a license to learn/teach a foreign language in shool?

This on the same level of absurdity as the SCO lawsuit.

I'll just use my *own* charset!

[sketerpot]

I offer, for your royalty-free consideration, the following scheme for avoiding paying royalties to people who apparently never learned how to think. Instead of "en-us", use "english-usa", instead of "de", use "deutch" (sp?), and so on.

Too incompatible for you? If so, we should just use GIFs and cough up to Unisys. Or these ISO yahoos could stop trying to charge for everything. If it's going to be standard, you shouldn't charge money for it.

umm...

[justMichael]

I don't think that LANG="en-US" would get you in any trouble..

but LANG="en_US" might ;-)

Money, of course...

[rjch]

On what grounds could uttering lang="en-US" be subject to any intellectual property right that justified any royalty demand?

On the grounds that someone thinks they have half a chance of collecting money by saying "it's mine!" of course.

Not Surprised

[rhysweatherley]

The ISO is a standards organisation that has consistently "not got it" when it comes to making standards available to the public.

Try Googling for most major standards and you'll get nothing but price lists, despite the fact that their entire organisation's publishing needs could be run off a 486 in a cupboard running a Web server.

I hope we can use this incident to start a wider discussion with ISO and educate them that a public standard that isn't available to the public free of charge kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.

One-tenth of a penny

[MaxTardiveau]

every time I enter e.g. www.yahoo.fr -- maybe a pop-up that informs me that the URL I have just entered contains copyrighted material, and that I have to pay the fee or face infringement penalties.

The future looks bright!

Clearly, ISO invented the use of "US" for United States and "UK" for United Kingdom. They deserve to be rewarded for their creativity.

[walks away shaking his head]

-- Max

Go ahead...

[lordvdr]

Something this absurd, while interesting, shouldn't even be worth caring about. The moment they choose to charge royalties, "the world" will choose to accept 'US-en' as the "standard" for indicating US English or 'eng-USA' or whatever and who cares. Remember Unisys? how far did they really get with their .gif fees? everyone said "*uck you", we'll work around it. everyone will do the same with this.

That's the point, Companies are not individuals

[Ricin]

And the bigger they are the more freedoms meant for individuals they enjoy. Legal entity of company == legal entity of individual is one of the major flaws in law at this moment.

BigComp gets *your* bill of rights and then some while you are increasingly being denied those rights, not even mentioning what a head on collision between BigComp and you would be.

This is the whole motivation behind the notion that advertising the untruth == free speech, same thing.

Libertarianism != Capitalism

[Tony]

One is a political ideology, the other is an economic philosophy.

Unfettered corporate capitalism leads to fascism (the state regulation of the economy) in that the state becomes a tool of the corporations, rather like you see in the USA today.

A well-structured capitalist society *requires* government intervention, for the same reasons a well-structured civil society requires government intervention (in the form of the police, and the judicial arm of the government). Even if you ignore the travesty of corporations-as-entities as practiced by the USA today, and concentrate on corporations-as-public-charters (such as the the US had before about 1880 or so), you still need regulation and monitoring. Otherwise, the biggest corporations will carry the most power, and therefore have the ability to "regulate" (in the political and economic sense) the functioning of corporations of lesser power.

This is why the US has the Sherman Act, and anti-trust laws. Now, these laws are not followed, as is evidenced by the recent anti-trust ruling against Microsoft, and the refusal by the US government to follow through on any meaningful penalty. But, even criminal law doesn't work against corporations, as seen by the recent inaction of the US government against the Enron corporation, and its executives responsible for those crimes.

The "true principals of capitalism" work no better than the true principles of communism. (*NOT* that there has been an implementation of true communism, except on extremely small scales. The most we've ever seen practiced by as large as a country is socialism.)

Obsolescene in public use

[Cyphertube]

Wouldn't this, in a reasonable world, suddenly come under the same purview as when a company fails to defend a trademark. Unless ISO has been hiding under a rock for the past 10 years, they would be clearly aware of the widespread adoption of these standards, and the adoption does not reference ISO as holding copyright, etc. It could be considered defensible to make such a decision were it simply to have been used in a small program, but when implemented by just about every browser and published by another standards group, it becomes impossible to defend such a decision.

Simply put, somewhere in this world I'm sure is a country that will recognise that ISO's failure to react earlier has effectively allowed the standard into public domain.

Re:What about slavery?

[Anonymous Coward]

kelnos wrote:

no actual harm is being caused to anyone because of IP laws

This is incredibly naive. People are dying all the time thanks to IP laws. This is because many people in this world die because of the high cost of medication, which is due in large part to the exclusive monopolies granted by patents. While it is true that research and FDA approval cost a lot of money, there is a lot of money being made well beyond what it takes to pay back the research costs in a lot of biotech companies. A lot of people talk about patents in biotech as if they are they only way to get funding for research. This is not the case. There are a lot of other ways it could work. The research really would be a lot cheaper without anyone skimming off the top. Also, FDA approval might be less expensive if drugs were being developed for the public good instead of profit. My rationale for that is that the FDA was originally created because of one drug company that used ethylene Glycol (the stuff in antifreeze) as a sweetener in childrens medicine because it was the cheapest thing available. A research effort working for the public good might be somewhat less likely to willingly poison thousands of children for profit.

If you want another example of IP laws killing people, how about when Chiquita banana sued a reporter for theft of intellectual property for his copies of voicemail messages implicating officers of the company in directing soldiers in a thirld world country to evict people from their homes at gunpoint. Maybe no-one died that time, but it has happened and will continue to happen when so much power that was never intended is granted to holders of copyrights and patents (trademarks are abused horribly too, but I have trouble seeing them killing people).

Re:Ill-Informed Juvenile Political Ranting

[baka_boy]

"Intellectual property" is no more real than cash, and similar in purpose: an agreed-upon convenience used to represent and transfer resources. Consentual shared hallucinations are still hallucinations.

However, if I make a copy of your book after you've started distributing it, it costs you nothing. Therefore, describing the outcome as theft is rediculous -- you still have your book, and now I have one, too. In fact, having additional copies of your work in circulation should bring you additional future rewards, as later works will be more highly valued.

Re:We don't need ISO ... use SIL

[blibbleblobble]

"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."

You'd suggest a standard proposed by someone with a Terms Of Use statement attached to it?

If we want to pick a standard for something, it should typically be about 20 pages of text, with an RFC number at the top, and copyight notice, if absolutely required, with the words "verbatim copying is permitted without limitation". Anything else is just not suitable for use in public systems