[governance] Why standards from ISO are not freely available?

[Jeremy Shtern]

Hi Everyone,

A colleague asked me a standards question that I thought maybe somebody 
on the list might have the answer to: is MP3 an open standard or not?

Feel free to email me on or off-list if you have some ideas and thanks 
in advance.

Cheers,

Jeremy Shtern

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Jeremy Shtern


Researcher: the media at McGill unit for critical communication studies

&

PhD candidate (ABD): Université de Montréal, département de communication


jeremy.shtern at umontreal.ca

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John Levine wrote:
> Standards organizations such as ISO have been around a lot longer than
> the Internet, and they've always depended on the sale of copies of
> standards for support.  I'm surprised that the ISO says that sales are
> only 30% of revenue, although that may be misleading since most of the
> dues paying ISO members are themselves standards bodies such as ANSI
> which in turn get most of their revenue from standards sales, too.
> (In the US, it's faster and cheaper to get copies of ISO standards
> from ANSI rather than ordering from Switzerland.)
>
> Historically, the people interested in standards have been engineers
> interested in building whatever the standards described, be it screw
> threads or mobile phones.  I've paid for my share of printed ANSI
> standards and PDFs and didn't begrudge the cost.
>
> The proposal on the table appears to be that governments should pay
> for standards production and distribution rather than standards users.
> Why is that a particularly good use of public money?  Most Internet
> standards are available for free from from the IETF anyway.  ISO
> standards tend to be for complex things where the cost of copies of
> standards is an insignificant part of the cost of developing whatever
> a standard describes.
>
> R's,
> John
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