charging for character pairs

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 21 Sep 2003 07:35:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Scott Bradner <sob () harvard edu>
Subject: charging for character pairs
To: dave () farber net





http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5079256.html

Scot
[]


New ISO fees on the horizon?
By <mailto:evanh () cnet com?subject=FEEDBACK:New ISO fees on the 
horizon?>Evan Hansen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
<http://news.com.com//2100-1032_3-5079256.html?tag=prntfr>http://news.com.com/2100-1032-5079256.html 


Information technology standards groups are raising warning flags over a 
proposal that could raise fees for commonly-used industry codes, including 
two-letter country abbreviations, used in many commercial software products.

At stake is a tentative proposal from the International Organization for 
Standardization (<http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.openerpage>ISO) to add 
usage royalties for several code standards, a move that opponents say could 
weaken standards adherence by forcing software providers to pay a fee for 
each ISO-compliant product they sell. The standards--ISO 3166, ISO 4217, 
ISO 639--cover country, currency and language codes, respectively.

News.context

What's new:
IT standards groups are rallying opposition to an ISO proposal to introduce 
usage royalties for widely adopted standards, including country codes.
Critics say the proposal could weaken standards adherence by forcing 
software providers to pay a fee for each ISO-compliant product they sell. 
The backlash illustrates growing sensitivity in software circles over 
belated intellectual property claims.

<http://news.search.com/search?version=x&tag=ex.ne.fd.srch.ne&q=standard>More 
stories on standards
The ISO currently charges copyright royalties for the purchase and 
reproduction of many of its standards documents, but does not charge for 
access to the country-code standard. In addition, the ISO does not 
currently charge for use of any of its codes, for example, within a 
software application.

The proposal is still in the early stages, and may yet be significantly 
altered or shelved. Still, technology standards groups--including the 
International Committee for Information Technology Standards 
(<http://www.ncits.org/>INCITS), the World Wide Web Consortium 
(<http://www.w3c.org/>W3C) and <http://www.unicode.org/>Unicode--are 
rallying opposition.

"Charging (usage fees) for these codes would have a big impact on almost 
every commercial software product, including operating systems," said Mark 
Davis, president of software consortium Unicode, which is seeking to set 
standard character sets for disparate computing systems. "They're used in 
Windows, Java, Unix and XML. They're very pervasive."

Representatives of Geneva-based ISO could not immediately be reached for 
comment.

The backlash against the ISO's proposal illustrates growing sensitivity in 
software circles over belated intellectual property claims. These claims 
have been asserted against standards and technologies that have won 
widespread adoption based, at least partly, on the presumption that they 
were royalty-free. Prime examples include claims against the MP3 digital 
music format and the GIF image format, as well as The SCO Group's 
<http://news.com.com//2100-7344-5077021.html?tag=nl>claims that portions of 
the open-source Linux operating system were lifted from its patented Unix 
code.

Analysts said the ISO proposal flies in the face of recent trends among 
standards groups, where royalty-free policies have begun to gain traction. 
For example, the W3C earlier this year backed a policy promoting 
royalty-free alternatives to patented technology whenever possible.

"This move is totally at odds with the trend toward openness and the 
adoption of royalty-free technology, at least in the software world," 
Dwight Davis, a Summit Strategies analyst, said.

A version of the ISO fee proposal surfaced in May, according to an Aug. 1 
letter from INCITS opposing the imposition of country code and other usage 
fees.

"INCITS' overriding concern is that this represents a radical departure 
from established practice with respect to standards," a copy of the letter 
posted on the organization's Web site reads. "In INCITS' opinion this would 
constitute a strong disincentive for manufacturers, large consumers and 
consumer groups to develop standards within standards organizations which 
might adopt this process or to subsequently make use of the standards in 
their products and services."

Opposition to the proposal heated up this week, when the W3C sent a letter 
to ISO Chairman Oliver Smoot, urging the group to reconsider the fee issue 
at an ISO Council meeting scheduled to take place on Saturday, Sept. 20, in 
Buenos Aires.

"These and similar codes are widely used on the Web," W3C director Tim 
Berners-Lee wrote in a letter, co-signed with W3C chief operating officer 
Steven Bratt, that was seen by CNET News.com. "In particular, the language 
and country codes are of direct interest to W3C and the users of W3C 
Recommendations in the context of HTTP, HTML and XML and various other 
technologies. Language and country codes currently provide a single, 
standard way of identifying languages (and locales) throughout the Web. 
Multilingual Web sites and Web pages, as well as internationalization and 
localization features, would be particularly affected."

The ISO is the world's reigning standards group, overseeing some 13,000 
standards in nearly every aspect of industry. The group's unique 
standards-setting authority comes, in part, from its close relationship 
with governments, many of which require compliance with ISO 
standards--although that list excludes the United States. The group 
operates in different countries through national affiliates, such as the 
American National Standards Institute 
(<http://news.com.com/null?tag=nl>ANSI) in the United States.

ANSI representative Stacy Leistner said he was unfamiliar with the ISO fee 
proposal. But he said the group constantly reviews its policies and 
implements changes as appropriate.

"The fee structure in place has been in place for years," he said. "It's 
time-tested, but also one that's constantly under consideration to see if 
it's the right approach, and, if it's not the right approach, should we be 
looking at doing something different?"

The ISO's claims on the codes stem from copyrights it owns on documents 
that describe the standards. ISO generally does not make its standards 
freely available, but sells them to fund its operations. Whether those 
copyrights apply to the codes themselves has not yet been tested, according 
to opponents of the proposal.

"There has not been a detailed discussion of how they own that copyright 
for the codes themselves," Martin Duerst, W3C Internationalization Activity 
Lead, said. "The copyrights may not apply to individual codes, but only to 
the whole collection of codes--like a dictionary, where each word is not 
copyrighted, but the entire collection of words and definitions is 
copyrighted."

Duerst said the ISO's proposal is troubling because so many other standards 
groups have adopted the ISO codes. For example, he said, the Internet 
Engineering Task Force (<http://www.IETF.org/>IETF) has largely adopted the 
ISO's country codes.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the many new country 
designations that followed, the ISO made its country code standard freely 
available with no usage fees.

Unicode's Davis said he believes the usage fee proposal will "die a 
well-deserved death." But he said it still poses a significant danger to 
the software industry. "It has been raised seriously, otherwise we wouldn't 
have flagged it as an issue."

The ISO fee proposal isn't the only ISO proposal that Unicode is fighting. 
The group has also sought to undo a recent ISO decision to reuse the old 
"cs" Czechoslovakia country code for Serbia-Herzegovina--a move that 
Unicode argues will have significant negative ripple effects for historical 
data.

Although the fees proposal has been widely distributed to ISO's national 
affiliates and is scheduled to be discussed by the ISO on Saturday, it is 
still a long way from approval, Unicode's Davis said.

Regardless of the outcome of the ISO's proposal, W3C's Duerst said it 
highlights the importance of free and open standards.

"It's not so much a legal question as a question of standards policy," he 
said. "If you start asking for money for the usage, people will stop using 
the standard. Then...there will be chaos."

  

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