>I have just realised that the body to which I meant to refer in my previous
>reply was ANSI, not NISO; and a little further research shows that both of
>these are independent, non-governmental organisations as well.
Right, Standards are generally created by trade groups like the IEEE for computer hardware and ADAPSO for computer software. In many but far from all cases ANSI, the US "national standards organization" which is the US member of the ISO, the International Organization for Standardization (yes, we know the letters are in the wrong order) plays a coordinating role and publishes the completed standards.
The government plays little role in standards development outside of a few specialized areas of measurement. (If you want to know exactly what time it is and how far off your watch is, NIST can tell you.) Other than that, all the government standards I know simply endorse an existing private sector standards.
It has always been my impression that the main reason ANSI et al assert copyright on their standards is that revenue from sales of copies of the standards is how they support themselves. For many decades this worked quite well, with the customers for standards almost all being industrial companies since most standards were for things like the shape of threads on a lightbulb. (University libraries could get sets at reduced cost.) But in recent decades, we now have a lot of standards for computer software which are of interest to many small-scale software developers, and the advent of text-processing software and computer networks means that the standards organizations have much the same problem that the RIAA claims to have, easy and widespread piracy, except that for standards it's real. ANSI has adapted somewhat; a downloadable PDF of a typical programming language standard costs under $20 while the paper equivalent is over $100, but we all know that the funding model is broken although noboby yet has figured out how to fix it.
To return to copyright, a fair number of standards are enshrined into law, particularly electrical, plumbing, and other building codes. I believe that they are nonetheless still copyrighted, since our local village budget always has a significant line item to pay for copies of the codes that the zoning inspector enforces, but I'd be interested to learn the details.
-- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 330 5711 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mailReceived on Tue Apr 22 2003 - 02:11:32 GMT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Mon Mar 26 2007 - 00:35:48 GMT