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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?"
"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.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
I, for one, welcome our new ISO overlords. And, if they need a broadcaster to help them find slaves for their royalty mines, they know where to look!
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 think the guy who invented the concept of royalties should at this point issue a lawsuit against the entire planet Earth for 1% of all gross national products that are protected under other royalties.
Dude, where's my packet?
And in other news SCO has anounced that all English speakers are infrenging upon their IP rights and are demading 1000$US for each word uttered or typed.
That communist line is pretty old. Time to update your database--"terrorists" are the current enemy.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
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.
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.
I don't think that LANG="en-US" would get you in any trouble..
;-)
but LANG="en_US" might
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...
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.
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
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
Perhaps the following discussion would better help you understand just how fucked up IP & Copyrights have now become.
Hey, us Brits invented the language, so you've been violating our intellectual property for the last 400 years or so. But don't worry, we'll only charge you 699 per sentence, as long as you say it before October 15.
Critics were quick to denounce the proposal, but admitted that the "cash-grab" move was unlikely to provoke any real backlash.
"Once they got that whole country and money code license fee put through, it was game over," said one US government official on condition of anonymity. "Now they're just, like, 'Well, what else can we charge for?'"
ISO distanced itself from the white paper, saying that it was "a modest proposal" put forth by an intern. "However, we will consider the ideas within as we would any other source," said Dr. Oliver Smoot, president of ISO. "And if there should happen to be megabucks within those ideas, we are most definitely there. W00t!"
Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman was unavailable for comment. However, those close to the computing guru said that he had been prepared for such an eventuality. "Richard switched long ago to non-carbon amino-like compounds," said one source close to Stallman. "It took some work to come up with a Free organic chemical basis for life, but he thought it was worthwhile. Looks like he was right."
Carousel is a lie!
In related news, ISO has instituted royalty fees for use of the metric system. Looks like en_US had good reason not to jump on the metric band wagon after all.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Slashdot - objective news source? I think not!
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
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.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor - Albert Einstein
I'm having a hard time seeing what would cover them.
MPAA method: Release item under copyright. When market is saturated or copyright nears expiration (whichever is soonest) change a scene or two, or add different colour, re-release, generating 'new' item and copyright.
SCO method:Release item. Hide recipe. Claim that all competitors stole and used said recipe. Refuse to produce until suitably bribed by appeasements and concessions.
Amazon method: release item that uses obvious method. Patent said obvious method.
ISO method: Release item. Wait until standard is commonly adopted, as with SCO method. When market has adopted standard, charge for using said standard.
Windows method:Release item into market. Use all of the above whenever possible. proceeSystem error: (a)bort, (r)etry, (f)ail???
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
In recent news:
Intel (TM) claims that the word "intellectual" is covered by their trademark Intel.
All intellectual property should therby be considered intellectual property of Intel (TM)
When those countries have wanted to use their native letters (such as A/AE) they had to pay some obscure american company some money because they had some sort of patent.
(yeah vauge, but i can't find a link right now)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
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
I propose an international unit to stop stupid ideas before they become real. any stupid ideas from anti-piracy fritz chips to mandatory crypto back doors and ISO country royalties would be targeted and the special unit of highly trained black-ops agents would come in and "gently persuade" the people involved to abandon the ideas. Ofcourse they would have to destroy themselves for being a stupid idea in the first place.. ill shut up now
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
George W.Bush, president of the A met today with the Chancellor of Uchland and the President of Ance. Later he will talk on the telephone with Mr Putin, president of Ssia, and with Mr Blair, Prime minister of nothing.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
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.
Actuall, it's not dead,
it's just owned
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
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"
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.
As a member of the Latin alphabet users community, I propose we counter sue ISO for using anything in the Latin alphabet character set, which predates the ISO standards. Furthermore, I highyl encourage members of the Arab community to countersue for use of the Arabic numerals.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
What would be the legal basis for ISO charging royalties on using these codes? Copyright does not cover it: for purely informational documents, copyright only covers the exact form of expression. I don't know of any other kind of intellectual property, however fanciful, that even comes close to covering the use of a set of codes.
So my question is: what kind of drugs do they smoke over there at ISO, and can I get some?
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
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.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
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).
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