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

[Kicki Nordström]

Dear  Sunil,

Interesting! But if some legal requirement is needed for DAISY Consortium in order to provide digital books for persons with print disabilities, I am sure they have done it as DAISY is such a huge spared format for reading in the world today amongst us who need this format! 	

It is interesting to read your comments on Linux, and it is well known amongst some of us and some are even trying to use it! Unfortunately Ubuntu is very premature yet, as you can not use it that advanced as JAWS, which today is the most developed screen reading program. But for all blind persons living in developing countries (who are 80% of the 180 Million blind persons in the world), I truly hope Ubuntu will soon become an open standard of the same quality as JAWS. 

It is true, JAWS does not really well work with Windows Vista yet, so most of us using the  expensive JAWS  will wait for a new version to soon be released. 

I think I will get in touch with DAISY consortium and ask them of how they manage to use MP3 and not valuate intellectual properties! 

Yours
Kicki  

Kicki Nordström
Synskadades Riksförbund (SRF) 
World Blind Union (WBU)
122 88 Enskede
Sweden
Tel: +46 (0)8 399 000
Fax: +46 (0)8 725 99 20
Cell: +46 (0)70 766 18 19
E-mail: kicki.nordstrom at srfriks.org 

kicki.nordstrom at telia.com (private) 


-----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
Från: Sunil Abraham [mailto:sunil at mahiti.org] 
Skickat: den 28 augusti 2008 13:48
Till: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Kicki Nordström
Kopia: Tapani Tarvainen
Ämne: Re: SV: SV: [governance] Re: Why standards from ISO are not freely

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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