Re: Standard implementation of constant, copyright or not ?
On 16/01/15 16:23, Geoffrey Coram wrote:
> In particular, Stan Krolikoski wrote:
>> Licensing part of standard (as opposed to licensing examples) under
> open source
>> seems counterproductive-- a "standard" is fixed until the relevant
> standards WG
>> decides to update it. Indeed, I would strongly argue that if anyone
> is able to
>> make changes to part of a given standard as they wish, then it ceases
> to be a
>> true standard.
I understand this position, but it is entirely possible to have a
standard that does not change or is under strict change-control, without
having copyright infringement as a stick to hit people with. A work
derived from a standard is not, itself, the standard (unless/until the
relevant standards body says it is), but it is potentially still a
useful thing for a third party to be able to construct without breaking
the law.
For instance, here are a couple of useful derivative works:
* a version of a standard with additional explanatory text
(rationale, examples, ...) after each paragraph
* a proposal for changes that someone would like to see in the next
version of the standard, adapting some paragraphs from the current
version to illustrate what they want
Surely the harmful thing is not deriving new works from the standard,
the harmful thing is misrepresenting those derived works by claiming
that they are the standard when they are actually not?
XMPP's XEPs (approximately equivalent to RFCs) are all
permissively-licensed
<http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0001.html#appendix-legal> and might be
an interesting model.
S
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