Questioning Copyrights in Standards

Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology

2/09/2008
(Original Publish Date: 6/22/2006)

Standards are essential to the operation of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and indeed, the modern information society, an integral part of the largely invisible infrastructure of the modern world that makes things work. Every time people send email, for example, more than two hundred formally adopted Internet standards are implicated. With the rise of the information economy, copyright has become a new prominent factor in the longstanding debate over intellectual property rights in standards, as standard-setting organizations (SSOs) increasingly claim and charge substantial fees for access to and rights to use standards such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) country, currency, and language codes and medical and dental procedure codes promulgated by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Dental Association (AMA).