Slashdot Mirror
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?"
These are the same guys who think they can set standards by copyrighting the standards and charging hundreds of dollars for a copy. I've implemented ISO standards; it was NOT pretty. Beleive me, the IETF model is orders of magnitude better. IETF: All standards available for free download. Draft standards require several independent implementations before approved. ISO: Argue about standard for several years in committee. Solve arguement by adding all the features competing companies ask for. Publish standard. Then spend next couple years publishing addendums to standard as people try to implement it and discover it's ambiguous and unimplementable. Why do you think we're all still running TCP/IP instead of the ISO/OSI protocol stack? Hint: Many years ago a company called Touch Communications implemented the entire ISO/OSI stack under DOS. It took around 600K -- leaving about 40K leftover for your application!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If anything he is libertarian. Anything that requires government intervention to protect is against the true principles of capitalism. You sir are much more communist in your belief of government interventionism.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
The words "intellectual property" seduce enough people into thinking it is fair to collect money for these things. In the long run we have to treat "standards" (not the ISO's but the worthwhile ones) just like programs. They are part of the public domain and they have to be defended.
And yes, this means silly things like ISO country codes and the Dewey Decimal System (you saw the prediction here, despite Melvile being dead these 100 years....)
"IP" is like tollbooths on highways. Start paying and they will never take them away. Building roads without them takes planning, maybe regime change too (see France, 1789; U.S.A., 1776).
=googol=
Intellecutal property in two easy lessons:
Theft by value: you have something and I take it.
Theft by reference: you think of something and I
think of the same thing.
The current president of the ISO, and the recipient of the letter mentioned in the article is Oliver Smoot, MIT '62.
Oliver has had a unit named after him, the smoot
This is an ESR standard in the public domain, and not an ISO standard, hence we can continue to measure objects in smoots for free.
The fact that this kind of immature pablum gets moderated as "Insightful" is evidence of the decline of Slashdot into a morass of ill-informed juvenile political ranting.
The existence of intellectual property is not the issue here. In fact, it looks like the ever-histrionic Timothy is the one who introduced the phrase into the conversation. (You really have to be careful to watch where the quotation marks are in Timothy's stories.)
Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on. If someone makes something, they own it until they decide otherwise. If a make a chair, it's my property. If I write a book, it's my property.
Only utopian fools who believe that "Everything Belongs to Everyone" seriously espouse the abolition of property rights. (Including those that protect the vaunted halls of open source software. Absent IP rights, open source would not be possible.)
That said, Timothy and many others need to understand that this ISO proposal is simply a bad decision. Even if they do approve it, how are they going to enforce it?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
They're not suing people for damages, they're
charging royalties. They could make minor changes then put a click through license on the website. "Non-commercial use free; commercial have your credit card ready" is the usual scam. Royalties are charged on standards all the time, unfortunately. Most of the defunct "wireless" standards from the tail end of the dot-com bust were this way. ISO gets karma points for nostalgia.
I agree it's silly. Standards are easily avoided. If not covered by a freely distributable license, never use someone else's standard. Don't even read it. Don't visit their website. Soon we will all learn to do this. It will be as reflexive as "never use code of unknown origin without a free software or open source license".
=googol=