From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Nov 05 2003 - 12:19:33 EST
From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
> Is it allowed to re-distribute, in a commercial application, the Microsoft
> and Apple mapping files available from the Unicode server?
>
> I am talking about the files published in the following directories:
>
> http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT
>
> http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE
>
> The header comment of mapping files in other directories under
> http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS often contain explicit instruction
> for re-distribution, such as:
>
> "Unicode, Inc. hereby grants the right to [...] make copies of this
> file in any form for internal or external distribution as long as this
> notice remains attached";
>
> "Unicode, Inc. specifically excludes the right to re-distribute this
> file directly to third parties or other organizations whether for profit
or
> not".
The official Microsoft GlobalDev website at:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev
is giving these references on:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/cphome.mspx
These pages do not contain such distribution licence requirements but they
don't also list a grant for using them.
But the bottom of the pages contain a link to the page "Information on Term
of Use", at:
http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm
which states:
PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE LIMITATION.
Unless otherwise specified, the Services are for your personal and
non-commercial use. You may not modify, copy, distribute, transmit,
display, perform, reproduce, publish, license, create derivative works
from, transfer, or sell any information, software, products or services
obtained from the Services.
but then:
NOTICE SPECIFIC TO DOCUMENTS AVAILABLE ON THIS WEB SITE.
Permission to use Documents (such as white papers, press releases,
datasheets and FAQs) from the Services is granted, provided that
(1) the below copyright notice appears in all copies and that both the
copyright notice and this permission notice appear, (2) use of such
Documents from the Services is for informational and non-commercial
or personal use only and will not be copied or posted on any network
computer or broadcast in any media, and (3) no modifications of any
Documents are made. Accredited educational institutions, such as
K-12, universities, private/public colleges, and state community
colleges,
may download and reproduce the Documents for distribution in the
classroom. Distribution outside the classroom requires express written
permission. Use for any other purpose is expressly prohibited by law,
and may result in severe civil and criminal penalties. Violators will be
prosecuted to the maximum extent possible.
So it seems that information in these documents and that will be "used" are
already authorized for redistribution. But they cannot be altered and the
copyright notice must be kept.
Your question is good, because there's normally a required authorization
licence, even to create derivative files that would "use" the information
listed there. Of course, if the software is developped with a Microsoft
development tool, the licence of that development tool will allow
distributing an application that use these charsets.
The problem is then: can we use and map the Microsoft charsets on non
Microsoft development platforms or in softwares not built with Microsoft
development tools in which these mappings are implicitly used, as part of
the MSDOS or Windows systems? For "OEM" codepages, it seems that Microsoft
has inherited and used charsets initially created by IBM, but it may have
licenced it from IBM to create MSDOS. The situation is much less clear for
Microsoft ANSI codepages.
I hope that when Microsoft offered to Unicode these files to be published by
Unicode, it has signed the licence agreement that authorizes such
publication by Unicode. It would be hard if Microsoft wanted later to claim
royaltees for all unauthorized use of these charsets (i.e. the mapping
between Windows ANSI codepages and Unicode, which, in the current form,
constitutes a derived work based on copyrighted product, i.e. the Microsoft
GlobalDev pages).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Nov 05 2003 - 13:24:36 EST