Rob Seaman wrote:
<snip>
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.
<snip>
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.
Ec