Dear Mr. Helck,
I am not a lawyer and I don't work for ISO. This is my personal opinion.
I cannot tell the country where you work from your e-mail address, but
generally the standards organization in your country would be able to give
you authoritative answers. In the US, it is ANSI in New York City.
212.642-4900 (voice)
212.302-1286 (fax)
If you use ISO standards in your products, you should be able to say that
without worrying about copyright issues. That is why ISO develops
standards. If you need to duplicate an ISO standard in your documentation,
then you have a copyright issue. If you need to duplicate a major part of
the standard or the main part of a standard, you likely have a copyright
issue. If you need to document a small number of the country or currency
codes, this should likely not be a copyright issue. However, if you need to
duplicate all of them, you need to discuss the copyright issue because this
is the main part of the standard.
Several years ago, I wanted to duplicate the 7-bit ASCII and the ISO 8859
code tables in a report that I was editing. To me, the code tables were the
main part of the standard. I sent copies of the material to ANSI, we
discussed how the report was going to be used (e.g., were we getting money
for it? was it for a commercial product?), and they granted permission to
use the code tables.
I would suggest that you discuss the issue with your national standards
organization and realize that it may take they some time to make a decision.
Good luck,
Ed Hart
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From: unicode
To: unicode
Subject: ISO questions
Date: Monday, September 25, 1995 10:01
Return-Path: <unicode@Unicode.ORG>
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 10:01:11 -0700
From: unicode@Unicode.ORG
Subject: ISO questions
To: unicode@Unicode.ORG
Errors-to: uni-bounce@Unicode.ORG
Reply-to: chris@tkna.com (Christopher Helck)
Message-id: <9509251701.AA02848@Unicode.ORG>
Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT
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I'm having trouble understanding ISO's policy regarding copyrights, and I'm
hoping that someone will be able to give me some pointers. Here's the story.
I'm designing a new data feed that my company intends to broadcast to its
clients. I would like to use ISO currency and country codes in the feed.
I would also like to doucment the codes in the customer documentation. When
I've asked ISO if it is ok to include their codes in our documentation I've
been shunted to a lawyer who told me that they could not make a decision
until they've seen my documents. The lawyer was unable to give me any
guidence as to what was and was not acceptable to them. I don't want to
write
a document, have it approved by my boss (this is a lot of work), and be
rejected by ISO.
Does anyone know what ISO will allow? Will our customers need to buy the
specs from ISO? Are there other international standards for currencies
and countries that do not have such restrictive copyrights and who's staff
can answer questions?
Any help will be appreciated.
I am not on the unicode mailing list, please respond directly. Thanks.
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