ISO country codes are freely usable
A few days ago, ISO has confirmed that the country, currency and
language codes are freely usable:
<http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/pressreleases/2003/Ref871.html>
| Ref.: 871
| 30 September 2003
|
| ISO reaffirms free-of-charge use of its country, currency and language
| codes
|
| ISO issues the following statement in response to recently publicized
| misunderstandings of its current practice and intentions regarding its
| widely used country, currency and language codes.
|
| * ISO is to continue with its established practice of allowing
| free-of-charge use of its country, currency and language codes
| from, respectively, the ISO 3166, ISO 4217 and ISO 639 standards,
| in commercial and other applications.
|
| * There is no proposal currently being considered by ISO to impose
| charges for use of these codes, including on the World Wide Web
| and in software applications.
|
| Based on international consensus reached within the ISO standards
| development system, these codes reduce the confusion that could be
| created if there were multiple, conflicting codes in common use. The
| development of the Web and of electronic commerce has been facilitated
| by the existence of the ISO standardized codes and their use has become
| pervasive.
|
| ISO encourages such developments by making the two-letter country codes
| contained in ISO 3166 available free of charge on ISO's Web site, along
| with a great deal of regularly updated information related to the codes
| and their use. The ISO Web site also has hyperlinks to the sites of the
| British Standards Institution (BSI) and the US Library of Congress -
| where the currency and language codes are, respectively, publicly
| available.
|
| [...]
This clarifies previous statements which indicated that a license fee
might be necessary. (I think this was discussed before on this list,
but I can't find the relevant message.)
Reply to: