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

ISO

[El]

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!

Re:Abolish "intellectual property".

[incom]

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.