Re: The rules of encoding (from Re: Missing geometric shapes)

I'm not sure I follow this analysis.

A./

On 11/8/2012 1:30 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
> 2012/11/8 William_J_G Overington <wjgo_10009_at_btinternet.com>:
>> However, an encoding using a Private Use Area encoding has great problems in being implemented as a widespread system.
> Wrong, this is what has been made during centuries if not millenium !
> Initially a private use definition, which was not "encoded", but found
> their way in widespread use once they were adopted by other editors
> (possibly by using glyph variants, including those also introduced by
> the initial author depending on the publisher he used and the amount
> paid for the publication.
>
> This is still true today: even if you define new glyphs, and as long
> as you do not explicitly give permission to others to reused those
> glyphs or variant of them, these glyphs remain private in terms of
> copyright restrictions on their designs. Making your publication
> "public" by depositing to a national library is not a situation where
> you grant an open licence to others : the legal deposit made at a
> national library is instead used as a proof of your date of work to
> claim your copyright on this work.
>
>> Also, I feel that implementation other than for research purposes using a Private Use Area encoding would cause problems for the future: I feel that a formal encoding is needed from the start.
> Certainly no. For widespread use you first need to create a work,
> claim ownership of copyrights, makde a legal deposit to proove it,
> publish an explicit open licence statement allowing reuse of your
> design by other authors, and then make your own work for convincing
> others to reuse these glyphs (or derived variants of them) in a way
> similar as yours.
>
> It is when there will be similar reuses by others, in their own
> publications, and when people will start communicating with them in a
> sizeable community, on a long enough period (more than the year of
> your initial publication), that the appearing "abstract" character
> will be saif existant (Unicode or ISO won't consider these characters
> as long as others than you alone are not using these designs legally
> in their published interchanges, printed or not, have not been proven
> to exist over a period consisting in more than 1 year by much more
> than just 1 independant author).
>
>> I feel that the rules for encoding such new symbols are out of date and not suitable for present day use.
>>
>> Unfortunately, it seems that there is not a way available for me to request formal consideration of the possibility of changing the rules.
>> Technology has changed since the rules were made.
> May be, but this just extended the number of technical medias useable
> for publications (even if copyright issues have been restricting a bit
> the legal reuses more tightly). There are still lots of documents
> produced on various medias (at least all the same since milleniums).
> Electronic documents are just newer medias for publications, but they
> certainly don't create a new restriction to permit widespread use.
>
> Also as the world population has grown a lot, the minimum size of the
> community needed to demonstrate its existence has grown proportionally
> (the requirements are larger for more recent documents, compared to
> historic characters, whose community of users has however grown with
> ages, because we can also include the new reusers of the historic
> documents over the much larger period where these characters have not
> been forgotten, allowing more documents to reuse them up to documents
> produced today).
>
>> Is it possible for formal consideration to be given to the possibility of changing the rules please?
> Not the way you describe. You are trying to put the egg before the
> chicken. But you forget that both the chiken and egg have a common
> creator and are in fact exactly the same thing.
>
> So even if yo uare still required to use private encoding, this is not
> what is limiting the birth of an abstract character from your glyphs.
> What is important is the number of documents reuing them, over a long
> enough period, by a community of authors legally recognized (either
> because they are dead since long enough htat their work have fallen in
> the public domain, allowing a significant increase of the number of
> reusers, or because the exclusive copyright claims have been relaxed
> by an open licence so that other will be allowed to reuse your design
> or variants of them in their publications, on various medias, not just
> electronic ones).
>
>
Received on Thu Nov 08 2012 - 07:39:17 CST