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From: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ISO 639
Message-ID: <25D2EBD5.120@marob.masa.com>
Date: 9 Feb 90 16:12:04 GMT
References: <3109@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <1091@tuminfo1.lan.informatik.tu-muenchen.dbp.de> <1938@pbhyg.PacBell.COM>
Reply-To: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Organization: ESCC,  New York City
Lines: 27

In article <1938@pbhyg.PacBell.COM> balavi@PacBell.COM (Behzad Alavi) writes:
>           Somebody had correctly pointed out whether it is 
>           EVEN ETHICAL for the International Standards to be
>           copyrighted in the first place!
>
>           Copyrights seem to limit the scope of distribution
>           and usage, which are apparently not what International
>           Standards were designed to do.
>
>           I am interested to hear more on this topic.  Of course
>           in the U.S., ANSI is a PRIVATE agency. That means it 
>           has as much right as any other business entity to collect
>           royalties, copyrights, etc. for any reason.  But
>           what about ISO/IEC, etc.  What is the justification
>           for "Copyrights" on those documents?

They are copyrighted for the same reason translations of the Bible are.
If the documents were in the public domain, you could make arbitrary changes
to them and then republish the resulting mutilated standard as "ISO nnn"
and nothing could be done to stop you.

Remember that public-domain doesn't just mean the right to make unlimited
copies; it also means the right to make unlimited derivative works.  You can
publish an edition of Shakespeare's sonnets (public domain) with every instance
of "are" changed to "is", and call it "The Original Sonnets by W. Shakespeare".
This state of affairs is obviously impossible for something called an
"international standard".