New ISO fees on the horizon?

New ISO fees on the horizon?
By Evan Hansen
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
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 (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.


Bottom line:
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.


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 (INCITS), the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and 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 claims that
portions of the open-source Linux operating system were lifted from its
copyrighted 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," said Dwight
Davis, a Summit Strategies analyst.

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 Saturday in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"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 (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," said Martin Duerst, W3C Internationalization Activity
Lead. "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 (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."