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]

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.

umm...

[justMichael]

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

but LANG="en_US" might ;-)

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.

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: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.