Re: copyrighted standards documents

At 08:20 23/11/00 +0000, you wrote:

>Smoke wrote:
>
> > I was referring to the fact that someone...forget who...mentioned the
> > standards were copyrighted and had to be purchased. If what you say is
> > true, then someone else is wrong. So which is it? If they are available
> > at a library, then they could be made available on the internet.

With copyright, you have to be clear about a few things. The fact that a
document is copyright does not necessarily mean that you are not allowed to
freely copy/distribute it. What copyright means is that the copyright
owner has the right to determine under what terms and conditions the
material may be copied/distributed. The fact that the document concerned is
or is not available at a library is irrelevant to this consideration. 2
examples from my own experience in standards development illustrate
different ways in which that right may be exercised:

- The IETF (the body that develops the standards for the Internet)
publishes their standards and draft standards as text files on their
website, and on various mirror sites. Anyone may freely download and print
the text; however, their documents remain "Copyright (C) The Internet
Society", indicating that they retain rights over the intellectual property
contained in the document. So, if you wanted to reproduce parts or all of
one of their standards in your own publication, permission would have to be
sought from the Internet Society.

- The IEEE (develops many standards - including the Local Area networking
Standards that I am involved with) chooses not to allow free access to its
copyright material; like any other book, you have to pay the cover price in
order to access the contents. Again, if you want to reproduce sections of
their documents, etc., then permission has to be sought before doing so.

Paying the cover price for a book generally does not grant you the right to
copy or reproduce the contents of the book in any way. All that libraries
do is to pay the cover price for a load of books and then allow their
members to read them; they generally do not have the right to copy the
contents of those books, and neither do their members.

Even if a document does not have an explicit copyright statement attached
to it, the document may still be regarded by the law as the intellectual
property of the author, and it therefore cannot be reproduced etc. without
the permission of the author.

Even if the information contained in a document is well-known or in the
public domain, copyright can exist relative to the way that a particular
author has expressed that information. Obvious example - dictionaries;
arguably, the words in a language and their meanings are well known and in
the public domain; however, copyright protects the particular way that a
given dictionary presents that information to the reader.

So, the general rule here is that unless you are absolutely certain that
the owner of the copyright in a document has granted free
reproduction/distribution rights, you'd better check with the owner before
you stick a copy of it on your website.

Regards,
Tony

Copyright (C) Tony Jeffree, November 23rd, 2000 ;-)