SV: SV: [governance] Re: Why standards from ISO are not freely

[Sunil Abraham]

Dear Friends,

On Thu, 2008-08-28 at 12:41 +0200, Kicki Nordström wrote:
> I think a lawyer expert on intellectual properties could give us
> information on this and I am likewise sure that DAISY do not step into
> something that internationally should be unlawful! 

I am not a lawyer but Tapani Tarvainen is right. MP3 is not a true Open
Standard because there are Software Patents associated with the standard
that are owned by Thomson Consumer Electronics and the Fraunhofer
Society of Germany, even though it is an ISO/IEC standard. These patents
are to be licensed by those interested in making an MP3 encoder or
decoder under a Reasonable and Non-discriminatory (RAND) license.
Royalty rates are provided here.  
http://mp3licensing.com/royalty/software.html

RAND licences are incompatible with most Free Software licences. Simon
Phipps of Sun Microsystems says that Free Software “serves as the canary
in the coalmine for the word ‘Open’. Standards are truly open when they
can be implemented without fear as free software in an open source
community."

Therefore users of the DAISY standard on Windows or Macintosh are
completely safe because MP3 support is built into the operating system.
And Microsoft and Apple is paying the required royalty. But users of
community based GNU/Linux distributions in countries that have
constitutionally recognized Software Patents are at risk. This might be
an insignificant number for the Daisy Consortium at the moment. But as
accessibility improves - I see many more visually challenged users
shifting to GNU/Linux. Already a blind user can install Ubuntu Linux
unassisted - something that is still not possible on Windows Vista.   

Best wishes,

Sunil

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