Intellectual property rights with usage of International Organization (ISO) lists; ISO 639 and ISO 3166-1. [#1436736]

ISO 3166-1 - the list of countries.
ISO 639 - the list of languages.

These are widely used and republished on the internet. This has lead to the common thought that these would be licensed under public domain. For example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 lists most of this data with no "use with permission" or copyright notice to the ISO. However, these standards are copyrighted material.

From a search this is what I could find out about this topic.

The short country names from ISO 3166-1 and the alpha-2 codes are made available by ISO at no charge for internal use and non-commercial purposes.

Ref: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists.htm

And a related press release (archive) appears to reiterate this.

As IPR are way outside of my area of expertise, so it would be great for someone in this field to found out if there are any issues here.

Comments

Comment #1

Alan D. CreditAttribution: Alan D. commented 14 February 2012 at 14:46

Project:	Drupal core	» Drupal.org site moderators
Version:	8.x-dev	»
Component:	other	» Licensing

Not sure where this issue should live. Switching queues as there is probably better background knowledge floating around here. This could be a major issue for Countries API / Countries modules!

Comment #2

Gerhard Killesreiter CreditAttribution: Gerhard Killesreiter commented 14 February 2012 at 15:09

Issue tags:

+Legal

Comment #4

Damien Tournoud CreditAttribution: Damien Tournoud commented 23 May 2012 at 11:21

As far as I know, this falls under the protection of databases. Meaning that the compilation is protected but not the underlying data. If you do an independent recompilation of the underlying data (like the one that Debian does), you are not infringing the copyright of the database.

Comment #5

Alan D. CreditAttribution: Alan D. commented 23 May 2012 at 13:46

Interesting. http://data.un.org is one of the two organizational sites that are listed as the data source and this publishes the entire dataset in one form or another (at least for countries). Happy to close this if you are confident about this.

Side note: The IETF were initially publishing this data, RFC/1700

Comment #6

kingandy CreditAttribution: kingandy commented 23 May 2012 at 13:57

Drupal itself is not commercial, and drupal.org is only using the country codes internally AFAIK, so should be covered by "made available by ISO at no charge for internal use". All we're displaying to the public is actual country names, and I don't believe the ISO has any claim to those.

IANAL, but I think that clause is really only there to stop people charging for the info. It's not in the ISO's interests to start barring people from using their standards, that would be pretty counterproductive!