ISO to charge for using country codes, language codes, etc?
Paul Eggert
ISO wants to charge usage royalties for ISO 3166 (country codes), ISO
4217 (currency codes), and ISO 639 (language codes). Presumably this
would mean, for example, that everyone sending email to or from the
.de and .jp domains would have to pay a royalty to ISO.
This leads me to wonder: where exactly does ISO's money come from?
Where does it go? What is their line-item budget this year?
How can outsiders tell whether ISO's Internet-standards budgetary
needs justify an imposition of a tax on the Internet?
Is there a brief and clear summary anywhere of answers to questions
like this? I briefly looked at the iso.ch web site and didn't find
many details. For example, the 2002 financial statement
<http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/aboutiso/annualreports/2002/pdf/2003ar20.pdf>
does not break down ISO's Internet-related work from its other worthy
causes.
Andreas Prilop
> ZDNet reports in <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5079256.html> that
> ISO wants to charge usage royalties for ISO 3166 (country codes), ISO
> 4217 (currency codes), and ISO 639 (language codes).
They could charge more money for the use of SI units (ISO 1000).
What about paper size (ISO 216)?
Did someone run amok?
Stephen Baynes.
news:240920031933353657%nhtc...@rrzn-user.uni-hannover.de...
Who owns the US patent for all this stuff? ;-)
--
Stephen Baynes CEng MBCS
My views are my own
Markus Kuhn
>ZDNet reports in <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5079256.html> that
>ISO wants to charge usage royalties for ISO 3166 (country codes), ISO
>4217 (currency codes), and ISO 639 (language codes). Presumably this
>would mean, for example, that everyone sending email to or from the
>.de and .jp domains would have to pay a royalty to ISO.
They are more thinking about commercial software vendors who
include significant parts of the entire ISO 3166 table into
their products. So it would not include email users, but it
would include Linux vendors who sell a product that contains
glibc (which uses ISO 3166 in the locale and timezone mechanism).
Their line of thinking seems to be that not every manufacturer
of a product that incorporates the ISO 3166 table has actually
bought the standard, so they loose out.
I personally believe, this is a complete non-starter. There has already
been a rather hostile response to the idea from a great many people
in JTC1.
>This leads me to wonder: where exactly does ISO's money come from?
Last time I asked (~1995), it was 2/3 membership fees from
national bodies (DIN, ANSI, AFNOR, BSI, etc.) and about
1/3 from sales of standards or royalties for ISO standards sold
by others. At the time, ISO had about 130 employees and their
annual running cost was in the order of 30 million CHF, if memory
serves me right, 2/3 of which are for salaries.
Markus
--
Markus Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ || CB3 0FD, Great Britain
Paul Eggert
> I personally believe, this is a complete non-starter.
That's good news.
>>This leads me to wonder: where exactly does ISO's money come from?
>
> Last time I asked (~1995), it was
The 2002 brief financial summary in
<http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/aboutiso/annualreports/2002/pdf/2003ar20.pdf>
is pretty close to your 1995 recollections. However, sales of
publications are down since 1998 (only 10% of revenue now) whereas
royalties have gone up (about 20% now). No doubt fewer people these
days want to buy printed (or electronic) copies of their standards.
Looking at the figures, 2002 was not a good year for ISO (a deficit of
about 1.8 million Swiss francs) and undoubtedly they are under some
pressure to raise revenues somehow.
I don't know, though: charging for country codes seems a bit over the
top. I'd almost laugh it off as not being serious, except for what
Verisign is doing to the .com and .net domains now.
Markus Kuhn
>At 25 Sep 2003 18:39:28 GMT, n03W39...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) writes:
>> I personally believe, this is a complete non-starter.
>That's good news.
Some of the protest against charging for ISO 3166 codes:
http://www.ncits.org/archive/2003/in031008/in031008.htm
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-positions.html
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondance/2003-09-23-isocodes.html
Some of the protest against recycling the CS country code:
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondance/2003-09-25-icann-cs-code.html
Markus Kuhn
>ZDNet reports in <http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5079256.html> that
>ISO wants to charge usage royalties for ISO 3166 (country codes), ISO
>4217 (currency codes), and ISO 639 (language codes). Presumably this
>would mean, for example, that everyone sending email to or from the
>.de and .jp domains would have to pay a royalty to ISO.
Markus Kuhn writes:
>I personally believe, this is a complete non-starter.
... which is now official:
http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/pressreleases/2003/Ref871.html
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.
The full ISO 3166, ISO 4217 and ISO 639 standards from which these
codes are drawn are available from ISO and its members on a sales basis,
as a contribution to supporting the standards development process.
However, ISO and its members do not charge for the use made of the
codes contained in these standards, subject to this being consistent
with ISO's copyright. For example, ISO does not charge organizations
for the inclusion of the country codes in their Internet domain names,
and ISO does not charge banks for using the currency codes in their
electronic financial transactions.
If a user of the codes, such as a software developer, wishes to claim
that its product incorporates the codes in conformity with the ISO
standards (which could be perceived by the market as an added value),
then it would have an interest in buying the standards to make sure
that this is indeed the case. But this is a "one-off" transaction for
purchase of the standards; ISO does not subsequently charge a fee
for use of the codes in the software product and has no plans
for doing so.
Like many organizations, ISO continually reviews its practices
and products in order to provide added value to its customers.
With regard to ISO 3166, ISO is considering a proposal to develop
an optional software service package that would facilitate
incorporation and maintenance of the country codes in IT products.
The service package being considered would include regular updating
of the codes, which would add value to products because they would
be conforming to the International Standard ISO 3166. The service
package being considered would be a charged option. However, no
decision has yet been made to go ahead and even if this option
were developed, ISO will continue to allow use of its country,
currency and language codes free of charge.
Press contact:
Roger Frost
Press and Communication Manager
Public Relations Services
Tel. +41 22 749 01 11
Fax +41 22 733 34 30
E-mail fr...@iso.org
H. Peter Anvin
By author: n03W40...@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn)
In newsgroup: comp.std.internat
>
> Some of the protest against recycling the CS country code:
>
> http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondance/2003-09-25-icann-cs-code.html
>
This one is pretty surreal. "We urge ISO 3166/MA to as soon as
practically possible revoke the assignment"... modern use already
exceeds residual legacy use.
ISO 3166-MA were between a rock and a hard place on this one,
partially because the procedures for ISO 3166 are fundamentally
flawed. Realistically ISO 3166-1 codes need to be reserved
indefinitely, but the procedures only allow for 5 years. When Serbia
and Montenegro came up, it so turns out that pretty much all sane
2-letter combinations in either English or Serbian (are used... "CS"
was the only one that wasn't in current active use.
Serbia and Montenegro is inherently difficult, because it's an uneasy
union and it's really important that there is no perception of it
being Serbia + a litte bit more.
ISO 3166-1 2-letter codes are a pretty dense space; there are only 676
possible combinations, about 50 of which are reserved for various
purposes, and there are approximately 190 sovereign nations on Earth,
plus the various nonsovereign territories. I don't know how many
would be additionally reserved if a reassigned code would be retained
indefinitely (I don't have access to ISO 3166-3 to check.)
-hpa
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