Michael, > >"Tim Berners-Lee has sent a letter of concern to the president of > >ISO about the idea of collecting royalties on...guess what... ISO > >language and country codes! According to the letter, the ISO > >Commercial Policies Steering Group is proposing a royalty on > >commercial use of ISO language, country and currency codes. The > >whole idea seems absurd. On what grounds could uttering lang="en-US" > >be subject to any intellectual property right that justified any > >royalty demand?" > > Good question.
It would seem to me that if W3C purchases the ISO standard that under the terms of the license they can use them in any manner that they see fit. ISO can not extend the terms of the license after the fact to include royalties on clients. If they extend the terms of the license then we should stop using the new ISO standard and use the old codes to set up a W3C standard. I don't think that the courts will uphold that ISO has the rights to go after every web page developer for royalties and that the W3C has the right to expect that either ISO maintains is current policies or that the W3C has the right to develop a compatible standard using the old codes. It would be like the Unicode Consortium deciding to start charging for using the standard. Carl
