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Comment by jtwaleson | Hacker News Reader

The fact that the content is copyrighted and can't be publicly discussed is the main issue.

That's not what copyright is at all.

You can see this by the fact that Wikipedia has complete details of the ISO date standard (as referenced in the parent tweet Tim replied to).

This means every single thing must be very carefully rewritten. You can not cite every single sentence in the full document, you would have to mimic Wine and rewrite the entire thing until your lawyers aren't worried about getting sued anymore.

And nobody's doing that.

Most people aren't going to quote much anyway, which means the people who don't know what's referenced can't understand it because they have no context. Which brings us back to square one, you can't meaningfully discuss the content in public.

> Which brings us back to square one, you can't meaningfully discuss the content in public.

Fair Use exception in the US, and I think that would be covered by Fair Dealing in the UK and similar countries.

That's an affirmative defense in the US though. That means you can still be sued and have to defend yourself in court.

I guess the trick is to pirate a specific localized version of the standard from an ISO member country that doesn't care about IP rights enough to sue you... say... PRC?

Most jurisdictions' copyright law covers translations as derivative work which is still protected.

The parent I was replying to said "and can't be publicly discussed is the main issue".

You absolutely can, trivially as the huge number of discussions or the ISO date format on StackOverflow show: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=ISO+Date

There are lots of issues with locked down standards. But copyright means they can't be publicly discussed is factually incorrect.

(Also fair use means it's fine to quote enough context for a meaningful discussion anyway)

The main problem here is that people who lack access to the document effectively can't participate in the discussions, if there isn't enough public information about the document accessible by other means.

You can discuss the general requirements, and paragraph numbers, etc, but there's a limit to how much somebody who has the document can quote without legal problems. Somebody else who sees the discussion can not know if the discussions contain complete enough information to "reverse engineer" the standard well enough to meet its requirements.

All those discussions about the ISO date standard involves getting information from somebody who has access to the document and who then shared the information in public. Not all documents has that degree of public commentary.

And if you need to ask about sections which haven't been previously described in sufficient detail for your needs, then you're personally relying on individual people who have access to read it and rewrite the information for you. Which is a lot of work and also legally uncertain.

Fair use standards are not all that consistent. And that's a legal defense you can use in court after already having been sued, not before. Enough for context can vary between one sentence or three pages.

You only have to do that if you're trying to make a substitute document. That's miles away from just discussing.

In the medical devices field we have standards like ISO 13485 and IEC 62304. They are very broad and high-level standards and require a lot of interpretation. What would REALLY help small companies that are just getting started, is a line by line explanation of what you need to do, why, and what possible solutions there are. I'm not sure, but I believe doing so could violate the copyright. Even the fact that I'm not sure prevents me from doing it.

> a line by line explanation of what you need to do, why, and what possible solutions there are.

That's where expensive consultants who already have interpreted the standards are paid to explain to you. It's a bit of a "cartel" imho.

Yes, and each one will tell you something different ;) I much prefer open discussion where the best ideas stay afloat and bad advice can be publicly shamed.

Wikipedia does not have complete details of ISO-8601. There are many aspects of the 2019 revision which are not mentioned at all in Wikipedia.

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