Doug Ewell wrote the following. quote
The paragraph on promoting PUA characters to full Unicode status makes a strange reference to these candidate characters being encoded by vendors in the Corporate Use subarea. I had never noticed this before. It seems inappropriate to reserve this scenario exclusively for characters defined by vendors, or in the Corporate Use subarea. In fact, Deseret and Shavian (the latter proposed for 4.0) were both originally encoded in the ConScript Unicode Registry, perhaps the best-known instance of scripts being promoted from the PUA; but they were *not* encoded by a vendor, and *not* in the Corporate Use subarea. Is there any reason for this passage to survive the 4.0 revision? -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California Amateur Unicode Exegete end quote There is potentially a very good reason. It depends whether promotion is considered as an honour or unfairness upon someone's intellectual property rights. People might possibly regard promotion in either way. The section states ".... may be encoded elsewhere as regular Unicode if ....". Does that word "may" mean that the committees have the right to do so, so that vendors using the Corporate Use Subarea are being notified that if they use the Corporate Use Subarea that, as they have used the intellectual property rights of the committees in using the Corporate Use Subarea, that the license conditions are that the committees therefore have the right to make free use of any designs added into the Corporate Use Subarea, even if that design is a registered trademark of the vendor? Consider the following scenario please. A person, A, invents a new board game. The game is quite complicated and A devises a set of game pieces for the board, consisting of 32 original designs. In order that A may produce documents using a Unicode text editor, A produces a font representing these 32 game pieces, encoding the characters as U+E200 through to U+E21F, and then produces various files for A's webspace, and providing a copy of the font for downloading from the website. As it happens, the game is seen by some students in a University and they start playing the game. Others see this and get interested. The game spreads and there is considerable interest. A writes more and more about the game, eventually also selling a CD-ROM with lots of information about the game and generally having an enjoyable time. Some years later, the standards committee are considering the matter of encoding board game pieces for a variety of games so that people may typeset actual games easily, including such games as chess and rithmomachia. Someone suggests including the 32 pieces of A's game. A hears about this and comments that no, do not try to encode A's pieces in regular Unicode, they are A's intellectual property, A does not want them so encoded. A is asked as to why this is A's view. A replies firstly that the mere fact that A chooses to say so is enough as the designs are A's intellectual property, yet adds that there is the very practical aspect that A has produced the font, all of the documents and the CD-ROM and that if the pieces are encoded in regular Unicode, then all of A's work is obsolescent: also, A is unwilling to let A's designs for the glyphs be encoded in a standards document, they are A's intellectual property and A has no wish to allow what A regards as a weakening of those rights by allowing the characters to be included in the standard. There is some discussion about this and A then states quite emphatically that the characters are in the End User Subarea, not the Corporate Use Subarea, and that, whilst recognizing that if someone gave permission that his or her glyphs in the End User Subarea could be promoted then that was fine, nevertheless any right of the standards committees which might exist to promote a character that is used in the Corporate Use Subarea is only for the Corporate Use Subarea, not for the End User Subarea. A states that that is why A put the characters in the End User Subarea in the first place, so as to avoid any possibility of the committees having any right to promote them. One way round this would be to state explicitly that characters for which there are intellectual property rights can only be promoted if and only if the owner of the intellectual property rights agrees to the promotion. It could also be explicitly stated as to which intellectual property rights would be affected by promotion and in what ways those intellectual property rights would be affected. For example, please consider the board game in the scenario. A claims that the 32 glyphs are copyright works of art. Are they? If A were to agree that the 32 characters could be included in regular Unicode, would A's intellectual property rights be eroded? Is it the case that if A does not agree, that if someone else tries to market a font containing designs for A's characters, whether as characters at U+E200 through to U+E21F or at some other code points, without A's permission that A could gain damages for infringement of copyright? William Overington 15 April 2002
