Open Specifications

 <  Day Day Up  >  

Open Specifications

Suppose someone writes a book that teaches how to calculate income taxes, a specification for a yearly process that you hate to do manually. You read the book at your local library. You then implement the specification in computer software, creating your own original copyrightable work. You do not copy the book in your software, except perhaps in a few places where it says things like "subtract your deductions from your gross annual income" and you translate that into source code within your software. Are you a copyright infringer?

Colloquially, we often say things like "You copied the specification." But this has little to do with the definition of copy that I explained in Chapter 2. What we often mean to say is, "You read and understood what the specification told you about income tax rules and procedures and then, starting from scratch but relying on what you learned, you wrote your software." If you copied anything, it was the book's underlying ideas ”what I have already described as "uncopyrightable subject matter."

In other words, the copying that you did when you implemented the standard is not necessarily copyright infringement. You do not appropriate the copyrightable intellectual property of the specification's author by implementing your software without directly copying the specification.

The specification document itself, of course, the book that was published by the standards organization, is copyrighted . That specification meets the definition of both "original work of authorship" and "copy" from the U.S. Copyright Act. (17 U.S.C. § 101.) The specification cannot be copied without the copyright owner's permission. (17 U.S.C. § 106.)

Simply because it describes an open standard does not mean that you can make copies or distribute that specification. You have to look separately to the specification license to determine whether you may do so. (This is no longer true in some jurisdictions for specifications that are incorporated by reference into laws and are enforceable under the law.) In general, the owner of the copyright to the specification ”perhaps the standards organization itself, or one or more of its members ”can license the specification in any way.

A specification license that prohibits people from reading the specification without paying a license fee to the licensor , or that restricts in any way the use of the information it contains, is not an open specification license. It is incompatible with Open Source Principle # 1. Such standards are not open standards.

A published specification describing an open standard, just like open source software, need not be distributed at zero price. (See Open Source Principle # 2.) Standards organizations can and some do sell copies of their specifications. Because the goal of most standards organizations is to maximize the implementation of their specifications, most often do not overcharge ”or charge at all ”for their documents.

Some standards organizations recover their costs by selling copies of their specifications and, when the cost is reasonable, most people will pay for official printed copies. Whichever the pricing model and whatever the price of a single copy of the specification of an open standard, any number of people can read that copy. So also may any number of people write software that implements that specification without any further payments to the copyright owner of the specification.

 <  Day Day Up  >  


Open Source Licensing. Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law
ISBN: 0131487876
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 166

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net