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The Almighty Buck The Internet Your Rights Online

W3C Objects To Royalties On ISO Country Codes 374

Posted by timothy from the all-your-base-names dept.
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?"
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W3C Objects To Royalties On ISO Country Codes More

W3C Objects To Royalties On ISO Country Codes

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  • Abolish "intellectual property". (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Thinkit3 ( 671998 ) * on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:13PM (#7014105)
    "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". (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:18PM (#7014139) Homepage
      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". (Score:3, Insightful)

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

        Actually, since I can't for the life of me tell the diference since I have know way of knowing what ideas are owned and what are not, I think that IP in general is a bad idea. IP is having the following positive effects on the world:

        * People are dying because of the artificial monopoly created by patents on drugs.
        * Real software innovation is slowing due to patents.
        * IP Litigation is a huge industry.
        * Kids are being sued for copying

      • Re:Abolish "intellectual property". (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @10:57PM (#7015178)
        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.
    • You are Communist, I presume?

      • You are a robot, I presume? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Thinkit3 ( 671998 ) * on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:24PM (#7014169)
        That communist line is pretty old. Time to update your database--"terrorists" are the current enemy.

      • Re:Abolish "intellectual property". (Score:5, Interesting)

        by incom ( 570967 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:34PM (#7014239)
        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.
        • Anything that requires government intervention to protect is against the true principles of capitalism.

          You appear to have confused capitalism with anarchy. In capitalism, we have a government which (at the bare minimum) recognizes and defends property rights: it's not capital if you can't own it, and it's not very effective capital if you can't own it without running your own police force to protect it.

        • Libertarianism != Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Tony ( 765 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:57PM (#7014663) Journal
          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.)

          • I get tired of people who talk about the Cold War as "defending capitalism" and who refer to the US as a "capitalist country".

            Capitalism is at best a secondary player to the real principle that underlies the founding of the Republic: Liberty.

            Now, because we have liberty, capitalism tends to arise within that framework, but it's an effect, not a cause in any sense of that word.

            When liberty comes into conflict with capitalism (and it often does) it's our moral duty to defer to liberty. For example, th


        • Anything that requires government intervention to protect is against the true principles of capitalism.

          Nonsense. By that reasoning, laws against murder are "against the true principles of capitalism".

      • OK, it's been over 100 years now...

        I think it's time people who accused other people of being "communists" understood what that term actually means.

        If you are against property rights (in general, not just intellectual) then you are an anarchist. Like the Diggers, the Levellers, the Autonomen, etc.

        You are absolutely, totally and utterly NOT a communist!

    • Re:Abolish "intellectual property". (Score:5, Informative)

      by Solitonic ( 136324 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:21PM (#7014153)
      GNU.org's "Words to Avoid" page at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html [gnu.org] explains it like this:

      Publishers and lawyers like to describe copyright as ``intellectual property''---a term that also includes patents, trademarks, and other more obscure areas of law. These laws have so little in common, and differ so much, that it is ill- advised to generalize about them. It is best to talk specifically about ``copyright,'' or about ``patents,'' or about ``trademarks.''

      The term ``intellectual property'' carries a hidden assumption---that the way to think about all these disparate issues is based on an analogy with physical objects, and our ideas of physical property.

      When it comes to copying, this analogy disregards the crucial difference between material objects and information: information can be copied and shared almost effortlessly, while material objects can't be. Basing your thinking on this analogy is tantamount to ignoring that difference. (Even the US legal system does not entirely accept the analogy, since it does not treat copyrights or patents like physical object property rights.)

      If you don't want to limit yourself to this way of thinking, it is best to avoid using the term ``intellectual property'' in your words and thoughts.

      ``Intellectual property'' is also an unwise generalization. The term is a catch-all that lumps together several disparate legal systems, including copyright, patents, trademarks, and others, which have very little in common. These systems of law originated separately, cover different activities, operate in different ways, and raise different public policy issues. If you learn a fact about copyright law, you would do well to assume it does not apply to patent law, since that is almost always so.

      Since these laws are so different, the term ``intellectual property'' is an invitation to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager common aspect of these disparate laws, which is that they establish monopolies that can be bought and sold, and ignore their substance--the different restrictions they place on the public and the different consequences that result. At that broad level, you can't even see the specific public policy issues raised by copyright law, or the different issues raised by patent law, or any of the others. Thus, any opinion about ``intellectual property'' is almost surely foolish.

      If you want to think clearly about the issues raised by patents, copyrights and trademarks, or even learn what these laws require, the first step is to forget that you ever heard the term ``intellectual property'' and treat them as unrelated subjects. To give clear information and encourage clear thinking, never speak or write about ``intellectual property''; instead, present the topic as copyright, patents, or whichever specific law you are discussing.

      According to Professor Mark Lemley of the University of Texas Law School, the widespread use of term "intellectual property" is a recent fad, arising from the 1967 founding of the World Intellectual Property Organization. (See footnote 123 in his March 1997 book review, in the Texas Law Review, of Romantic Authorship and the Rhetoric of Property by James Boyle.) WIPO represents the interests of the holders of copyrights, patents and trademarks, and lobbies governments to increase their power. One WIPO treaty follows the lines of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been used to censor useful free software packages in the US. See http://www.wipout.net/ for a counter-WIPO campaign.

    • Re:Abolish "intellectual property". (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sounds good to me. Mind if I publish your personal letters and journals and make money off them? No, of course you wonln't, because they're not your property, right?
    • "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.

      Three words:
      Baby, bath water.

    • Ill-Informed Juvenile Political Ranting (Score:4, Interesting)

      by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:24PM (#7014483)
      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?

      • Re:Ill-Informed Juvenile Political Ranting (Score:4, Insightful)

        by baka_boy ( 171146 ) <<lennon> <at> <day-reynolds.com>> on Saturday September 20, 2003 @09:22PM (#7014761) Homepage
        "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.
      • Intellectual property is as real as the chair I'm sitting on.

        There is no "Intellectual Property". There are Copyright, Trademark, Patent, and Trade Secret laws to protect your ideas, name, and inventions. Each of these are vastly different, covering different subjects and having different rules. To point at someone and say "you're violating my 'intellectual property'" is bogus. You must pick one of the above, and defend your claim appropriately.

        Even if they do approve it, how are they going to enfor

  • Welcome ! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:13PM (#7014110)
    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 ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by El Cubano ( 631386 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:15PM (#7014117)
    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.

  • Top Level Royalties! (Score:3, Funny)

    by joeszilagyi ( 635484 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:16PM (#7014126)
    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.

  • And in other news (Score:4, Funny)

    by darkstar949 ( 697933 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:19PM (#7014145)
    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.

    • Cela veux dire que tu leur doit trente et un mille dollars (en comptant les milles dollars US comme quatre mots) et que l'idiot qui va essayer de me traduire leur devra environ trente quatre milles dollars.

  • Cost of Databases? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Scottm87 ( 689558 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:25PM (#7014172)
    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.
    • Have you ever seen how much ISO charges for their standards? You have some standards that are just a few pages, and they are like $75.00.

      It's not surprising, not surprising at all. I predict that doing anything commercial on the internet is going to incur some costs, just like putting together a car costs money.

      Standards are quite expensive. On the other hand, you have RFCs, which are publically available. And you also have IEEE giving away their 802 standards for free, in PDF form, once those standards a

  • I'll just use my *own* charset! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sketerpot ( 454020 ) <sketerpotNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:25PM (#7014176)
    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... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by justMichael ( 606509 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:26PM (#7014179) Homepage
    I don't think that LANG="en-US" would get you in any trouble..

    but LANG="en_US" might ;-)

    • Well, we've got a solution! We define the OSI language code standard that's exactly the same as this one, but replaces all _s with -s. See, Slashdot can produce things other than bad BSD trolls and SCO stories!

  • Money, of course... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rjch ( 544288 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:26PM (#7014182) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rhysweatherley ( 193588 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:27PM (#7014187)
    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.

    • Re:Not Surprised (Score:5, Informative)

      by divec ( 48748 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:42PM (#7014283) Homepage
      Not Surprised [...] The ISO is a standards organisation that has consistently "not got it" [...] a public standard that isn't available to the public free of charge kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise.

      You're right, but this proposal is an order of magnitude worse. Even if the ISO C spec is non-free, it is possible to write implementations of that standard which are free (GCC, TCC etc). If this proposal were to be followed, it'd be impossible to write open-source software which used ISO 3166 / 639 codes for countries or languages. This is especially problematic since they've waited for these codes to become widespread (e.g. as vital parts of the HTML, XML and POSIX standards) before saying they might have a problem with their free use.


      This suggests to me that the proponent doesn't understand about free / open-source software, which is currently contributing hugely towards the very standardisation ISO is supposed to promote.

    • The ISO sucks. Their a monney grubbing orginistation that needs to die.

      They charge the comiitie members to *make* the standards.
      They charge the public to view the standards.

      And for what? They provide no value.

      The C++/C fiaso is a joke - they are allowing the two language to diverge for no good reason. C++ should be a superset of C, but not accoring to the ISO - it's getting harder all the time to create proper ISO C code that works with an ISO C++ compiler in C++ mode withoug a crap load of macros and kl

    • How much is that in smoots? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jerryasher ( 151512 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:23PM (#7014479)
      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 [catb.org]

      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.

  • ISO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:28PM (#7014195)
    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:ISO (Score:5, Informative)

      by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:34PM (#7014232) Homepage
      Why do you think we're all still running TCP/IP instead of the ISO/OSI protocol stack?

      We're running TCP/IP because the CSRG decided to release BSD under a free license.

      TCP/IP might be better than OSI, but we're not using TCP/IP for any technical reasons; we're using TCP/IP because it is the standard, it is the standard because everyone supports it, and everyone supports it because there was a free TCP/IP stack available for anyone who wanted it.

      • Re:ISO (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Or, was paid by the DoD to release it under a free, commercial-friendly license.

        But back to the grandparent's point -- it's been said that the RFCs don't fully specify TCP/IP. That's why a "official" reference implementation like Berkeley helps adoption immensely.
      • No, we're running TCP/IP because ISO just plain sucked. Back in the late '80's I attended a Usenet lecture on the OSI RPC mechanism (I think it was called ROSE). I saw a lot of strange stuff in it, especially some things that caused it to have performance problems on RISC processors. After the lecture I asked the speaker, who was one of the authors of the standard, how he thought it compared against Sun RPC (which was then the most well known RPC mechanism). He said that he had never looked at the Sun R

  • One-tenth of a penny (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MaxTardiveau ( 629919 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:28PM (#7014202) Homepage
    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

  • lang="en_US" (Score:5, Funny)

    by BabyDave ( 575083 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:31PM (#7014221)

    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.

    /me hears a knock at the door.
    /me opens it to find Frenchmen, Germans, Celts, Normans, Danes, Vikings, Romans, Greeks, etc ... all accompanied by lawyers.

    • I thought that's why we spelled it "center" and not "centre" -- to avoid paying royalities to the Brits!

      • Yeah, but your poor attempts at obfuscation do not hide the fact that center is a clear derivative of the word centre.

        And having deliberately obfuscated the language demonstrate willful infringement which means triple damages. Bouahahahaha.

  • ISO to charge for use of proteins, amino acids (Score:5, Funny)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:32PM (#7014226) Homepage Journal
    GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - In what one observer termed a "trial balloon", the ISO today released a white paper proposing a mandatory licensing fee for the use of "amino acids, proteins, and all derivatory compounds...for the use, creation, furtherance and sustaining of life on Earth."

    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."

  • Metric System (Score:4, Funny)

    by dfn5 ( 524972 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:38PM (#7014264) Journal
    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.

  • Conflict of interest? (Score:5, Funny)

    by DogIsMyCoprocessor ( 642655 ) <dogismycoprocessor@yah o o . c om> on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:43PM (#7014286) Homepage
    In examining the HTTP response headers for this page, I notice the following -

    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    Slashdot - objective news source? I think not!

  • Go ahead... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lordvdr ( 682194 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:49PM (#7014314)
    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.

  • What IP law would they use? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:57PM (#7014350) Homepage
    These codes are probably too small for copyright. They aren't patented. They aren't trademarks or service marks.

    I'm having a hard time seeing what would cover them.


    • 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 distr

  • systems (Score:5, Funny)

    by SolemnDragon ( 593956 ) <solemndragon AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday September 20, 2003 @07:57PM (#7014352) Homepage Journal
    RIAA method: Release item under copyright. Saturate market. Raise prices until no longer sustainable. Obtain personal information of those filling market for free with the easily replicable product. Sue for 'damages.'

    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???

    /me shaking my head sadly....

    • ISO method: Release item. Wait until standard is commonly adopted, as with SCO method. When market has adopted standard, charge for using said standard.

      Actually, that's the Unisys method. The ISO method is to rip off the Unisys method.

      • I worked at Unisys while they were getting much of the bad publicity. According to my memory of the situation:

        1. Unisys developed and patented a compression algorithm.
        2. Compuserve licensed that algorithm for their graphics format (.GIF).
        3. The original web browser programmers built in compatibility for the popular Compuserve graphic format. (I have read stories that imply they knew it used protected IP, but did not care.)
        4. Most web site developers used the format to build web pages with graphics.
        5. Uni

        • Re: Unisys method (Score:3, Informative)

          by Teancum ( 67324 )
          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 under

  • Intellectual property (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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)
  • To: Dr. Oliver Smoot, President, International Organization for Standardization
    Is this the [mit.edu] Oliver Smoot?

  • Much like in scandinavia then? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Snaller ( 147050 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:06PM (#7014397) Journal
    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)
  • Let them go right on ahead and do it. They will cause a lot of damage, and in the process of recovering from it the world will make them irrelevant.

  • We don't need ISO ... use SIL (Score:5, Informative)

    by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:14PM (#7014438) Homepage

    We don't need ISO for language codes. Besides, two letter codes are too limiting. SIL [sil.org] has organized a very thorough set of three letter codes [ethnologue.com] (usable according to their terms [ethnologue.com]) for every language as part of the Ethnologue [ethnologue.com] project, including artificial [ethnologue.com] languages and sign [ethnologue.com] 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).

    • does it have a code for kilingon?
    • Skapare says We don't need ISO for language codes ... use SIL

      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.

    • "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
  • 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

  • in related news... (Score:4, Funny)

    by wfmcwalter ( 124904 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:16PM (#7014443) Homepage
    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.

  • We can rant all we want... Dewey Decimal is next (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Googol ( 63685 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:16PM (#7014444)
    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.

  • Freedom of Expression is dead. (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Famous Druid ( 89404 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:22PM (#7014476)
    Actuall, it's not dead,
    it's just owned [alternet.org]

  • 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.

  • What legal basis? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Daniel Phillips ( 238627 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @08:41PM (#7014578)
    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?

  • Obsolescene in public use (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Cyphertube ( 62291 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @09:03PM (#7014683) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • ISO have put atleast a small amount of effort into creating and managing ISO language codes, so why shouldn't they get payed for it?

    This is exactly the type of thing IP laws were made for, organisations alowing free use of a product until it saturates the market, the kind of marketing stratergy any shrood business man would be proud of.

  • Here's What Started This (Score:5, Informative)

    by HardCase ( 14757 ) on Saturday September 20, 2003 @10:36PM (#7015096)
    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).

    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 /. article is a little inflammatory, fairly inaccurate and that pretty much nobody has read the CPSG's statement.

    Even so, I'm with Tim Berners-Lee's position that collecting royalties on a commonly used standards seems self-defeating.

  • s/4127/4217/ (Score:3, Informative)

    by mutende ( 13564 ) <klaus@seistrup.dk> on Sunday September 21, 2003 @02:19AM (#7015943) Homepage Journal

    From the letter:

    The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) wishes to express its deep concerns over a recent proposal by the ISO Commercial Policies Steering Group (CPSG) to charge fees for the commercial use of ISO codes such as ISO 639 (language codes), ISO 3166 (country codes), and ISO 4127 (currency codes).

    Make that ISO 4217 for the currency codes

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