William Overington scripsit:
> 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?
What license conditions? What intellectual property? Unicode does not
encode registered trademark symbols.
The whole point of this paragraph is to warn you that if you encode some
characters, say Limbu or Tekumel letters, in the PUA, the UTC/WG2 may end
up encoding them elsewhere, in which case you can either switch or live
with the dual encoding.
> 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.
The font itself may be copyrighted if it is an outline font. Bitmap fonts
are not copyrightable, at least in the U.S. The designs are probably not
protectable as trade dress, since they are functional. "Intellectual property"
covers many different kinds of legal protection with many different sets of
rules. Emphatically not everything a person devises counts as property.
> 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.
On what theory?
> A is
> unwilling to let A's designs for the glyphs be encoded in a standards
> document, they are A's intellectual property
On what theory?
> 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,
Since there is no definite line between the two subareas, this argument is
undisprovable and inadmissible.
> 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.
In general, if there is actually any such right-owner, the character will not
be encoded. Most such characters are dingbats that Unicode can live without.
> For example, please consider the board game in the scenario. A claims that
> the 32 glyphs are copyright works of art. Are they?
That would be up to a court. It would be prudent to avoid encoding such
things in the face of any such claim.
> 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?
Most unlikely, as noted above. My font can approach your font arbitrarily
closely without infringing it, and bitmap fonts cannot infringe one another
because there is no copyright in them. There is also no copyright in
type designs as such, though there may be trademark rights in font *names*,
which is why Helvetica became Helv and then Arial.
-- John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_
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