Alex Brown mention copyright violation for the leak of the draft specification. He is calling on ISO lawyers to pursue the infringers. Some countries should move and draft a resolution to respect ISO's copyright, and defend the business model of Standard Bodies:
And (I did hint we might come down from being high-minded) talking of copyright violation I notice some of the dafter quarters of the web have published the ISO/IEC 29500:2008 (OOXML) text. Now, while not many people know for sure what ITTF do to a text when they prepare it for publication, one thing they do do for sure is to put a copyright statement on every page. So what we have witnessed is a brazen act of copyright violation. The boobies have even been so good as to boast about the bandwidth requirements their crimes have occasioned (no further questions, m'lud). Even now, I can hear those Geneva lawyers licking their lips over this one …
After all, the Standards Bodies needs money to pay their staff. Here is the position of the Finish Standards Body about free standards available online:
Recommendation 10 - Free standards
SFS is strongly against the free delivery of the ENs.
If EN standards on ICT sector will be free:
- The coherency of the national standardization system will be distorted which will have negative impact on the legal IPR of the NSBs at European level as well as globally.
- It also has impacts on the NSBs economy, whose business model is very much leaning on the sales of standards.
- One of the most important issue is the marketing of the standards (and thus enhancing the use of standards) it's not attractive for NSBs to make standards available, if they can't have any economic benefit for their attempts. Who will publish, promote and make EN standards available if they are free?
- If EN standards will be made available by some other channels, who will guarantee that they really are available and the collection is kept up-to-date? Who cares for the revisions and corrections? Which are the other channels, and how will customers find them? Will availability of standards be equal to all stakeholders and all users? Who will assist the users (SMEs!) in the implementation of EN standards?
- It will be difficult to define which standards belong to ICT sector the classification between ICT and other sectors will become unclear.
- The visibility of the EN standard on ICT sector could actually be much worse than it is now.
- Internet is not a solution; Internet as a channel to deliver products is not free for the provider.
Respect for IP! At least in Taiwan, they do promote it:
