ISO codes: stability and royalties (was: Ambiguity)

Misha Wolf Misha.Wolf at reuters.com
Sat Nov 15 14:01:04 CET 2003


I note with regret that, in the interest of the stability of URIs, we 
can't ask the IAB to correct the spelling of "correspondance" in:
 
http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondance/2003-09-25-icann-cs-code.htm
l

Misha :-)


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Davis [mailto:mark.davis at jtcsv.com] 
Sent: 15 November 2003 04:39
To: Misha Wolf
Cc: IETF Languages
Subject: ISO codes: stability and royalties (was: Ambiguity)


There are a couple of general issues regarding the use of ISO codes,
both in RFC
3066 and in other places. The Unicode consortium has taken positions on
these
(see http://www.unicode.org/consortium/utc-positions.html), and the US
L2
committee is working through various channels to bring these problems to
the
attention of the appropriate people in ISO. We feel confident that once
they
realize the importance of these issues, that they will move forward to
address
and resolve them.

For a concrete illustration of the stability problem with the current
ISO codes,
suppose that a database uses ISO 3166 country codes to mark people's
birthplaces. Upon action by the ISO registration authority, all such
data can be
rendered invalid. By the recent action of the 3166 registration
authority, for
example, someone born in Czechoslovakia will now be on record in that
database
as being born in Serbia and Montenegro. Because of the use of ISO 3166
in key
language codes such as RFC 3066, this also invalidates language codes.

As you can see by the links on that page, in response the Internet
Architecture
Board has even taken the action to request ICANN *not* to register cs as
a
high-level domain name.
(http://www.iab.org/documents/correspondance/2003-09-25-icann-cs-code.ht
ml)

On the related issue of ISO royalties, ISO has taken a very important
step with
the issuance of a press release
(http://www.iso.org/iso/en/commcentre/pressreleases/2003/Ref871.html).

That press release is not quite enough yet to settle the issue, because:

(a) The text used in the press release was not definitive ("is to
continue",
"there is no proposal currently being considered", "has no plans for
doing so").
Such language reserves the ability to change at any time.

(b) this was a press release, and has no legal or policy standing within
ISO; it
could be reversed at any time. to completely settle the issue, it should
at
least appear in the appropriate ISO policies and procedures, or in the
text of
(revisions of) ISO 4217, ISO 3166, ISO 639, and ISO 15924.

Mark Davis



-----------------------------------------------------------------
        Visit our Internet site at http://www.reuters.com

Get closer to the financial markets with Reuters Messaging - for more
information and to register, visit http://www.reuters.com/messaging

Any views expressed in this message are those of  the  individual
sender,  except  where  the sender specifically states them to be
the views of Reuters Ltd.



More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list