Re: ISO intellectual property (was Standards)

[Tom Bradford <bradford@dbxmlgroup.com>]

> Don Park wrote:
> 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.

According to international copyright law, any document that is produced
is automatically protected by copyright, registered or not.  But from
what I understand, it doesn't disallow derived works, or external
referencing from other documents.  If it did, the entire WWW would be a
massive copyright violation.   And a trademark only protectes the use of
a name, not a process or specification.  

So things like Common-XML and Minimal-XML are perfectly within their
right to derive from XML, just as the W3C was perfectly within its
rights to dervice from SGML and even go so far as to make references to
ISO documents.

> 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.

I dunno, I think considering how complex and twisted XML has become, I'd
rather write a bunch of SNMP hooks.

--Tom