george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe) (01/08/88)
In article <6967@brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes: >In article <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >>My understanding is that the drafts and the actual standard are released >>into the public domain. Correct? > >I can't give a definitive answer to this. The X3J11 committee working >drafts have been neither Copyright nor published. Some standards are >Copyright, but I don't know if any ANSI or ISO standards are nor whether >this one will be. That is not something that X3J11 decides. It is my understanding that the IEEE applies copyright protection to their standards as a means to prohibit people from changing the text without authorization. I always believed that it was really done to generate revenue. As for ANSI and ISO I have no idea what their policies are. In any event, it is a disservice to the community for whom a standard is to serve to withhold wide dissemination of a proposed standard. >>If so, would their be any problems >>with someone sending copies of the next draft electronically? If I get >>a hard-copy, I can scan it into an ASCII file and send it to anyone who >>asks. >The master source for the draft is troff input, using a possibly modified >version of the -mm macros, I believe. It has not been made available >electronically to anybody that I know of, despite requests, because it >is not in the committee's charter and there is no volunteer to take care >of doing this. Until the question about Copyright is resolved, you >shouldn't copy the document in any form. If the only reason it is not being distributed electronically is because no volunteer could be found to answer mail requests or provide UUCP access then I'll do it. I'd bet many others would too. In order to resolve its copyright status, merely look at a published draft. If it does not have a proper copyright notice along the lines of "Copyright (c) 198x by somebody or something" then it is in the public domain. If such a notice was inadvertently omitted from a published draft but added to later versions, then the one without it is still in the public domain. In such a situation, the later version copyright applies only to the changes. The original work, having entered the public domain, stays in the public domain. From that anyone may make a derived work to which they may apply their own copyright (covering only their changes). Disclaimers: I am not a lawyer. If you need to depend on the above seek the advice of a lawyer. The opinions represented here are mine, unless you don't agree with them - in which case they are someone else's :-). In any case, they aren't necessarily those of my company. -- George M. Sipe, Phone: (404) 662-1533 Tolerant Systems, 6961 Peachtree Industrial, Norcross, GA 30071 UUCP: ...!{decvax,hplabs,ihnp4,linus,rutgers,seismo}!gatech!rebel!george
barmar@think.COM (Barry Margolin) (01/08/88)
In article <23133@rebel.UUCP> george@rebel.UUCP (George M. Sipe) writes: >It is my understanding that the IEEE applies copyright protection to their >standards as a means to prohibit people from changing the text without >authorization. I always believed that it was really done to generate >revenue. As for ANSI and ISO I have no idea what their policies are. I'm not sure about ISO, but ANSI definitely copyrights all their standards. ANSI is almost nothing but a publishing house, which also maintains the guidelines for the technical committees that actually produce the standards. Almost all of ANSI's revenue comes from selling the final versions of standards (drafts are distributed by the secretariat organization for the particular committee -- CBEMA is the secretariat of X3, the TC on computers). They have very little interest in making it easy to get copies of standards through other mechanisms, as it will just cut into their profits. X3J13, the Common Lisp standardization committee, has been discussing convincing them to release the standard. Common Lisp has a built-in DOCUMENTATION function, and many vendors would like to be able to use the ANSI wording in their documentation. It looks like it will be an uphill battle. Barry Margolin Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com uunet!think!barmar
bright@Data-IO.COM (Walter Bright) (01/09/88)
In article <11140@brl-adm.ARPA> TLIMONCE%DREW.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >My understanding is that the drafts and the actual standard are released >into the public domain. Correct? My understanding is that they are copyrighted. The problem I ran into is that, as a compiler vendor, I wanted to use the ANSI descriptions of the library functions in the compiler manual. It seems rather pointless to be forced to rewrite the definition so it is 'distinct but equivalent'.
daveb@geac.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) (01/21/88)
If the standard-making bodies consent, it would be a service to the
community to post it, **in little dribs and drabs**, to an applicable
source group.
If the copyright allows copying "not made for direct commercial
advantage" (aka the standard ACM copyright statement), it is
trivially postable.
I might also argue that that posting the standard may be lawful
in states/provinces where the law allows copies to be made for legitimate
research and academic purposes. (And therefore this is cross-posted
to misc.legal for comment).
--dave (lose our minds? we never publish our minds!) c-b
--
David Collier-Brown. {mnetor yetti utgpu}!geac!daveb
Geac Computers International Inc., | Computer Science loses its
350 Steelcase Road,Markham, Ontario, | memory (if not its mind)
CANADA, L3R 1B3 (416) 475-0525 x3279 | every 6 months.henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (01/24/88)
> ... They have very little > interest in making it easy to get copies of standards through other > mechanisms, as it will just cut into their profits. There is also a specific problem with the release of machine-readable forms of standards: the possibility of mutated versions without warnings of the mutations. This is, unfortunately, *not* an imaginary problem; it really has happened. At least some of the people involved in setting ANSI and IEEE policy on such things consider this the more important consideration, or so I am told. Incidentally, those who rail against the Selfish Standards Publishers who are afraid of things "cutting into their profits" should first look at what those profits are used for, and whether those activities are worthwhile. I doubt that massive reductions in ANSI's publishing revenues are really in the best interests of mankind, for example. -- Those who do not understand Unix are | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology condemned to reinvent it, poorly. | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry