RE: ISO intellectual property (was Standards)

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Title:

They admit that.  They also don't care.  They have a large body of

moneyed members willing to implement their specifications.  On the

other hand, the American courts have a tort for misappropriation that

while not used in other countries' courts, is available in the country

that has the most companies that are members of the W3C and

have to abide by American contract law and disputes arbitrated

in American courts.

 

Remember, we are looking at the notions of standards, specifications, etc.

and inquiring what the value of these are (why does the XML spec

make reference to ISO 8879 if it doesn't need to, why do people insist

on the W3C being a standards organization when the results are

exactly the same with the current policies and processes).   IP is just one level

of this.  It is a good trail to follow because it outs several problems

with authority (there is none and where there are assertions of such,

they are all local (canadian, american, etc.) but the locale is important

because that is the venue).    A bit more research may uncover other

precedents old, new, or vague.  When it gets to a court, a panel

of judges has to call that one.

 

I didn't say the situation wasn't twisted.  It is.    It may also mean

that the references out of the statutes in Texas, the sort of stuff

XML.GOV promotes, etc., aren't worth a hill of beans in a contractual

dispute. 

 

Hard to say.  No rules.

 

And those simple designs of five years ago are getting awfully twisted

too.  SGML looks good by comparison to that.  It needs some modernizing.

That is something ISO should consider seriously.

Len

http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h

-----Original Message-----
From: Don Park [mailto:donpark@docuverse.com]

Both Common-XML and Minimal-XML are subsets of XML, so I guess the same argument can be made that SML-DEV misappropriated W3C's intellectual property.  Right or wrong, its a twisted trail.

 

It was my understanding that W3C has trademarked the word "XML" and copyrighted every specifications it produces.  If my understanding is right, then W3C is claiming ownership over some words and a growing set of specific word sequences, not ideas nor concepts.

 

I care less about intellectual properties and more about good simple designs.  For the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at SNMP in detail.  I don't know about you guys, but SNMP goes in the same basket as SGML.