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: wrote: gave on the issue was that any standard used by 100% open-source -- no money required as in free. Even though what is being charged by humble opinion... So, the consequent question I asked you're not going to use any (ISO or national) standard then how can you assure the WP community copyright(s)?" John that you really do not seem to hear the question because that is also missed somewhere in this hard-to-browse-and-search newsgroup? 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." ISOs business model is a pittance though. this thread: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikidata/618 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?csnu… amount of money. (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 often trivial and unavoidable, like a hammer is a tool and it would make no sense to give up this eventually some crazy copyright protection...however may be do now think that a hammer could also equally well be classified as wardrobe item (given what one sees wouldnt wonder anymore)) > > Regarding the comment by Denny Vandrecic which documented > policy regarding patents and copyrights, see e.g. <http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Patent-Policy-20040205/> for W3C standards. this page I can't really see why this is an answer to the questions, could you please