Hello,

The genesis of the legal question is the thread concerning using ISO Topic Map precepts not "SNAKs". Surely you know a number of individuals on this forum feel that our challenge at that time was not thoughtfully engaged.  Instead we received replies focused on costs associated with ISO standards, insisting that pirate ethics were mandated by the WMF, to swat away our basic questions.  For instance, Nadja conflated our asking about ISO Topic Maps as a base design standard with incorporating ALL ISO STANDARDS EVER PUBLISHED into the wikidata database.

Obviously I subsequently withdrew from engagement with Wikidata when the design team failed to seriously engage in the challenge at the time about a distinct technical orientation towards transclusion instead of (imho archaic non-wiki needlessly complex) client/server apis which, still to this day, I obviously consider a flaw of the wikidata design.

That said, the legal questions are likely trivial; they were and are to me merely a prop for more important, but now dead and past, issues.  Wikidata has committed to specific implementations; in the interests of community I support those while hoping that (a) SMW doesn't wither and then die (b) individual WPs can somehow participate uniquely in the semantic web (c) individual WPs widely adopt what Wikidata has wrought.  I do know (and am developing) an SMW-based "Topic Maps" extension is feasible and practicable -- the benefits of which are too obvious to ignore to those who care. 

party on - john

On 04.09.2012 01:42, Nadja Kutz wrote:

John McClure wrote:

"I don't think you're hearing the question. A reply y'all gave on the issue was that any standard used by
Wikidata needed to be 100% open-source -- no money required as in free. Even though what is being charged by
ISO to support its business model is a PITTANCE in my humble opinion... So, the consequent question I asked
then was, if you're not going to use any (ISO or national) standard then how can you assure the WP community
that Wikidata is not violating someone's copyright(s)?"

Hello Lydia,

Unfortunately I have to agree with John that you really do not seem to hear the question because that is also 

what I read as your reply. Or was there another reply which I missed somewhere in this hard-to-browse-and-search newsgroup?

Thus please explain a bit more what you mean exactly by "Unless something changed on the freedom status of the documents needed nothing changed since we discussed this last."

I do not agree with John that the ISOs business model is a pittance though.

That is as I linked to in this thread:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikidata/618

the ISO sells their items seperately and alone e.g. the basic description of Iso inch screw threads:

http://www.iso.org/iso/iso_catalogue/catalogue_tc/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=51386

costs 80 CHF

so this could add up rather quickly to quite an amount of money.

I thus asked (here:http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikidata/576) wether one shouldnt ask for packages or at least for the use of the ISO classification scheme. I dont know how much copyright there is on classification schemes in general though. (I could imagine that this is a juridicial problem since big parts of a classification scheme

are often trivial and unavoidable, like a hammer is a tool and it would make no sense to give up this  

classification just because there was eventually some crazy copyright protection...however may be

lawyers do now think that a hammer could also equally well be classified as wardrobe item (given what one sees 

sometimes in jurisdiction I wouldnt wonder anymore))

Regarding the comment by Denny Vandrecic

"Because we ARE using standards like RDF or OWL (or HTML or URIs) which
are W3C and IETF standards, and which in turn have a well documented
policy regarding patents and copyrights, see e.g.
<http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/> for W3C
standards.

I hope that answers that question."

By looking at this page I can't really see why this is an answer to the questions, could you please

explain this a bit more?

thanks nad