Re: Concerning proposals

From: William Overington (WOverington@ngo.globalnet.co.uk)
Date: Mon Apr 15 2002 - 02:50:06 EDT


Doug Ewell wrote the following.

quote

The paragraph on promoting PUA characters to full Unicode status makes a
strange reference to these candidate characters being encoded by vendors in
the Corporate Use subarea. I had never noticed this before. It seems
inappropriate to reserve this scenario exclusively for characters defined by
vendors, or in the Corporate Use subarea. In fact, Deseret and Shavian (the
latter proposed for 4.0) were both originally encoded in the ConScript
Unicode Registry, perhaps the best-known instance of scripts being promoted
from the PUA; but they were *not* encoded by a vendor, and *not* in the
Corporate Use subarea. Is there any reason for this passage to survive the
4.0 revision?
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
Amateur Unicode Exegete

end quote

There is potentially a very good reason.

It depends whether promotion is considered as an honour or unfairness upon
someone's intellectual property rights. People might possibly regard
promotion in either way.

The section states ".... may be encoded elsewhere as regular Unicode if
....". Does that word "may" mean that the committees have the right to do
so, so that vendors using the Corporate Use Subarea are being notified that
if they use the Corporate Use Subarea that, as they have used the
intellectual property rights of the committees in using the Corporate Use
Subarea, that the license conditions are that the committees therefore have
the right to make free use of any designs added into the Corporate Use
Subarea, even if that design is a registered trademark of the vendor?

Consider the following scenario please.

A person, A, invents a new board game. The game is quite complicated and A
devises a set of game pieces for the board, consisting of 32 original
designs. In order that A may produce documents using a Unicode text editor,
A produces a font representing these 32 game pieces, encoding the characters
as U+E200 through to U+E21F, and then produces various files for A's
webspace, and providing a copy of the font for downloading from the website.

As it happens, the game is seen by some students in a University and they
start playing the game. Others see this and get interested. The game
spreads and there is considerable interest. A writes more and more about
the game, eventually also selling a CD-ROM with lots of information about
the game and generally having an enjoyable time.

Some years later, the standards committee are considering the matter of
encoding board game pieces for a variety of games so that people may typeset
actual games easily, including such games as chess and rithmomachia.
Someone suggests including the 32 pieces of A's game. A hears about this
and comments that no, do not try to encode A's pieces in regular Unicode,
they are A's intellectual property, A does not want them so encoded. A is
asked as to why this is A's view. A replies firstly that the mere fact that
A chooses to say so is enough as the designs are A's intellectual property,
yet adds that there is the very practical aspect that A has produced the
font, all of the documents and the CD-ROM and that if the pieces are encoded
in regular Unicode, then all of A's work is obsolescent: also, A is
unwilling to let A's designs for the glyphs be encoded in a standards
document, they are A's intellectual property and A has no wish to allow what
A regards as a weakening of those rights by allowing the characters to be
included in the standard.

There is some discussion about this and A then states quite emphatically
that the characters are in the End User Subarea, not the Corporate Use
Subarea, and that, whilst recognizing that if someone gave permission that
his or her glyphs in the End User Subarea could be promoted then that was
fine, nevertheless any right of the standards committees which might exist
to promote a character that is used in the Corporate Use Subarea is only for
the Corporate Use Subarea, not for the End User Subarea. A states that that
is why A put the characters in the End User Subarea in the first place, so
as to avoid any possibility of the committees having any right to promote
them.

One way round this would be to state explicitly that characters for which
there are intellectual property rights can only be promoted if and only if
the owner of the intellectual property rights agrees to the promotion. It
could also be explicitly stated as to which intellectual property rights
would be affected by promotion and in what ways those intellectual property
rights would be affected.

For example, please consider the board game in the scenario. A claims that
the 32 glyphs are copyright works of art. Are they? If A were to agree
that the 32 characters could be included in regular Unicode, would A's
intellectual property rights be eroded? Is it the case that if A does not
agree, that if someone else tries to market a font containing designs for
A's characters, whether as characters at U+E200 through to U+E21F or at some
other code points, without A's permission that A could gain damages for
infringement of copyright?

William Overington

15 April 2002



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