The International Standards Organization is discussing changes to its rules, following a growing realization that copyright issues surrounding the ISO standardization procedures could cause problems in the new age of Java and Internet technologies. Copyright issues were at least one of the factors in the failure of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Public Windows Initiative, which went through the European Computer Manufacturers Association standardization process before being passed on to ISO, where the process stalled. Current copyright rules require anyone reproducing International Standards Organization specifications – only available on paper – to pay a royalty to it. Anyone can implement an ISO standard, but the standards documents are copyrighted, so physically reproducing a specification incurs a charge, including where those specifications are disseminated by ISO business partners such as the British Standards Institute or the American National Standards Institute. ISO’s copyright requirements used only to apply to its international standards, but observers say that it would also like to apply them further down the chain, even at the Web or Internet level, if it could. International Standards Organization insiders say the organisation will almost certainly have to abandon its copyright and intellectual property rules and allow its standards to be downloaded freely from the Web if it is to have any hope of accommodating the rising tide of Internet-based technologies as ISO international standards. Moreover, it calls into question the need for these multiple standards organizations at all.
