John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> (05/25/90)
rpw3%rigden.wpd@sgi.com (Rob Warnock) wrote: > The CCITT (and ANSI and IEEE) standards > are copyrighted, and the standards organizations are largely supported > through the sales of their standards documents. They would disappove > strongly of anyone typing in one of their docs and putting it online. > CCITT/ISO/IEEE/ANSI != RFC. (Too bad.) > It is often the case that *draft* standards are available for free > (hardcopy only) while the standard is being developed... But once the > standard is finalized, you can't get the drafts (at any price). It's in the interest of these organizations to make standards expensive. It is counter to the interests of the users (who wrote the standards). These standards are *all* written by committees made up of whoever wants to participate. The standards bureacracies just do [a small part of] the administrative work involved. Most of the work is donated by committee members and their companies, particularly the chairman. Suppose the standards committee explicitly placed the final draft copy into the public domain. Better yet, the editor of the standard and/or the committee could copyleft the standard. If the final draft standard is public domain, the CCITT (et al) will be able to claim a copyright on the version they publish -- but anyone will be able to pass around the identical final draft in electronic form at no cost. Furthermore, there are actually regulations and/or laws against companies selling things to the government that are public domain, so it might end up that the CCITT would be in violation of those laws in so far as it sold copies of the standard to governments. If the final draft standard is copylefted [copyright by someone, with an explicit notice that it and derived works can only be redistributed if the recipient can redistribute under the same terms], even the versions you might buy from CCITT will have to permit copying by xerography as well as by OCR and posting-to-the-net. The ownership of a document written by a committee has probably been addressed somewhere but it's clear it isn't a work-for-hire since the CCITT, etc, are not paying them to write it. They're volunteers working toward a common goal. So they collectively own it and can decide on its fate. I'm sure the first committee to do this would get a lot of pressure from the standards org but in the end if the committee stands firm, there is nothing the bureaucraps can do except to refuse the draft copy, start another committee, and hope it doesn't happen again. Of course, the same people can join the new committee -- if it ain't open to the public, it ain't developing a public standard. Meanwhile, the industry will implement the draft, since it will be widely available, and will start noticing that maybe they don't need these dinosaur bureacracies getting in their way anyway.