Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Rob Seaman wrote:
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A more revolutionary suggestion is to open up the technical standards process. Many international standards are proprietary, such as ISO-8601 that any of you who were engaged in Y2K remediation efforts must surely be familiar with. Familiar with, but perhaps have never seen a copy of, because they charge real bucks. Another example just from the area of timekeeping is ITU-R TF.460-6. What is this you say? The internationally recognized (e.g., by our State Dept.) definition of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC underlies standard civil time throughout the world. Here is a theater-of-the- absurd quote from the minutes of a recent ITU meeting of their working party 7A:
"After the introduction of the document the WP-7A counsellor informed WP-7A that a preliminary document i.e. the PDRR, could not be circulated beyond WP-7A according to ITU-R resolutions nor could the currently in effect Recommendation ITU-R TF.460-6, be attached to the SRG report with an explanation of proposed changes since all ITU-R Recommendations are only sold by the ITU-R."
To give you a sense of the kind of service opening this standard up would provide, the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) is debating removing any connection between UTC (i.e., the time on your wall, your wrist, your cell-phone and your laptop) and the motion of the Sun in the sky, by eliminating leap seconds. Small in the short term. World-changing in the long term.
Vast number of other standards documents that underlie the infrastructure of the modern world are similarly protected behind proprietary walls. I recall a piece from the early days of Wired magazine describing one noble soul's fruitless efforts to convince ISO to loosen their proprietary policies.
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Oh golly yes! My major gripe with the IEEE is that they won't accept public domain documents - I recently had to work with their software design document guidelines and was informed by my supervisor "this is a copyrighted document, look after it".
This is an interesting issue. It ties in with freeing the laws.
To what extent do international standards have the force of law? If the United States adopts such a standard to have the force of law within the United States then it should be subject to the same copyright provisions as any other law of the United States. This does not necessarily help in other countries, but it's worth considering.
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