I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ANSI+INCITS+226-1994+(R1999)
Be warned, the quality of the document is awful and they are technically
lost.
1. The document they sold me was a document which looks like (and
subsequently verified by them) that (in sequence):
a. was printed on a printer
b. hand scanned on a flatbed scanner at pretty low quality
c. is cutoff in places and nearly every page has a different alignment
d. they then shrink the page size to leave room to put the purchaser's
name on every page to be sure you don't share the document.
2. ANSI's web site hangs very often
3. Their automated purchase process gives internal errors. You end up
having to call them, get an ftp login, and download the branded junk.
When you call them they just say that's all they have.
And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
Blake McBride
On Feb 26, 7:34 pm, Blake McBride <·····@mcbride.name> wrote:
> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
>
> http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ANSI+INCITS+226-1994+(...)
>
> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful and they are technically
> lost.
>
> 1. The document they sold me was a document which looks like (and
> subsequently verified by them) that (in sequence):
>
> a. was printed on a printer
> b. hand scanned on a flatbed scanner at pretty low quality
> c. is cutoff in places and nearly every page has a different alignment
> d. they then shrink the page size to leave room to put the purchaser's
> name on every page to be sure you don't share the document.
>
> 2. ANSI's web site hangs very often
>
> 3. Their automated purchase process gives internal errors. You end up
> having to call them, get an ftp login, and download the branded junk.
>
> When you call them they just say that's all they have.
>
> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
... a better job than they.
William James wrote:
> On Feb 26, 7:34 pm, Blake McBride <·····@mcbride.name> wrote:
>> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
>>
>> http://webstore.ansi.org/RecordDetail.aspx?sku=ANSI+INCITS+226-1994+(...)
>>
>> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful and they are technically
>> lost.
>>
>> 1. The document they sold me was a document which looks like (and
>> subsequently verified by them) that (in sequence):
>>
>> a. was printed on a printer
>> b. hand scanned on a flatbed scanner at pretty low quality
>> c. is cutoff in places and nearly every page has a different alignment
>> d. they then shrink the page size to leave room to put the purchaser's
>> name on every page to be sure you don't share the document.
>>
>> 2. ANSI's web site hangs very often
>>
>> 3. Their automated purchase process gives internal errors. You end up
>> having to call them, get an ftp login, and download the branded junk.
>>
>> When you call them they just say that's all they have.
>>
>> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
>> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
>
> ... a better job than they.
>
Thanks!
Blake McBride wrote:
> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
...
> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
...
> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources and
maintain the spec? I took a stab at converting them to pdfLaTeX (with
indices and hyperlink goodness) but never shook out all the typos
introduced by the conversion and mass search-and-replace.
Who owns the copyright anyway? ANSI borrowed from Steele; Pitman et
al shaped the spec and wrote the hyperspec, and for the past many
years the TeX sources have been on public FTP.
Ownership issues aside, is anyone in the ownership chain trigger-happy
enough to sue for infringement (assuming derivative docs dropped the
ANSI endorsement but maintained acknowledgment)?
IIRC, others have already converted the hyperspec to other formats; is
there any reason to hold back on the original TeX?
- Daniel
D Herring wrote:
> Blake McBride wrote:
>> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
> ...
>> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
> ...
>> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
>> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
>
> Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources and
> maintain the spec?
It is unconscionable that such an important document could be
essentially kept from the public by exorbitant prices and of the poorest
possible quality.
Blake McBride
P� Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:40:18 +0100, skrev Blake McBride
<·····@mcbride.name>:
> D Herring wrote:
>> Blake McBride wrote:
>>> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
>> ...
>>> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
>> ...
>>> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
>>> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
>> Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources and
>> maintain the spec?
>
> It is unconscionable that such an important document could be
> essentially kept from the public by exorbitant prices and of the poorest
> possible quality.
>
> Blake McBride
As it is publicly avaliable in HTML format I'd hardly call it hidden.
I use it to look things up and this seems the most convenient format for
that.
--------------
John Thingstad
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Common Lisp spec from ANSI - they are lost!
Date:
Message-ID: <uejauhm2n.fsf@nhplace.com>
"John Thingstad" <·······@online.no> writes:
> P� Wed, 27 Feb 2008 05:40:18 +0100, skrev Blake McBride
> <·····@mcbride.name>:
>
> > D Herring wrote:
> >> Blake McBride wrote:
> >>> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
> >> ...
> >>> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
> >> ...
> >>> And these people are the keepers of American Standards?
"Keeper" is a funny word here. There was no PDF to keep. The
standard was delivered to ANSI in PostScript, not PDF. That's what
they print from. So there was no PDF to keep.
I don't know how they produced the PDF, since I was not involved in
that part of things--it happened years later. But the best guess I've
heard from random people who've ordered it and griped about its
quality is that someone scanned the printed copy in order to make it.
I personally have only an original copy (the expensive one) and its
print quality is clean and pretty.
> >>> A High
> >>> School student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
> >> Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources
> >> and maintain the spec?
To be clear, the TeX sources that circulate around are NOT the sources
for the ANSI standard, they are sources for an earlier draft.
They happen to agree in technical detail with what ended up being in
the formal standard. But in terms of identity as a document, they
have a different front page, different front matter, different running
heads, different page numbering (I managed to save about 200 pages in
the final version produced for ANSI by squeezing out some interline
spacing, bringing the page count down from around 1350 to around
1150), and a different index (accommodating the different page
numbering). It is those elements I've enumerated that I understand to
be what ANSI has copyrighted.
As to whether the copyright on the TeX sources would permit the action
you describe, I can't say with any degree of certainty. And I'm not
a lawyer anyway, so presumably you wouldn't want to ask me.
What I find unusual is that anyone cares. With most other languages,
the standard is never seen by end users. People write other documents
that are seen so that users won't have to see the standard. (And CLHS
is already available for those who do want to see what is effectively,
though not actually, the text of the standard.) So what is the driving
force to care?
Wouldn't the energy spent worrying about this be better spent on
writing so-called "killer apps" that would make CL more popular not
through showing people its cool definition but showing people its use?
I love using CL as much as the next person, but really, if I were
going to evangelize the language it would be by showing something cool
I wrote, not by telling people they need to use cooler coding
techniques. Let them ask me why I managed to crank together something
cool in a short time, etc.
What stands between me (or anyone) and commercial success is not
having yet another copy of the same language definition in some new
format.
When I think of what it would take to "salvage the TeX sources" and
"maintain the spec" I just think "how much better would that time,
money, and energy be spent if spent on doing something, rather than
documenting something? ... and not even documenting the doing of
something new, but documenting the thing already made now over a dozen
years ago..."
> > It is unconscionable that such an important document could be
> > essentially kept from the public by exorbitant prices and of the
> > poorest possible quality.
If you want good quality, order the expensive one that was done in
PostScript. I have no idea what happened to the PDF version but I've
never heard a single soul recommend it.
Independent of print quality, what commands a high price is the fact
of ANSI's name on the document. That is, in essence, what makes it a
standard. Anything else is just paper with words.
That isn't as unreasonable as it sounds. The correct time is
something you can get from most people's wristwatch in a "good enough"
form. But there is only one official source of time. (Or maybe a
small few. But in any case, many fewer than the number of
wristwatches.) So something like time.gov, which happens to be
offered free, could probably sell its info and find buyers. Paying
for a "source of authority" is a common practice. Being the US
government, of course, it can afford to be charitable and not ask for
compensation. [That's why we can fight trillion dollar wars for
capricious reasons. We just seem to do things and don't worry about
the cost. Ah, but I digress. Sigh...]
I actually haven't looked into it in detail, so I might be wrong, but
I've always assumed ANSI has no really major other source of revenue
than selling its standards. If that's so, it needs to charge enough to
break even, so the price point may be dictated somewhat by pragmatics.
Too bad they didn't think to standardize the dollar bill, so they
could just print money...
Think of ANSI as a book publisher. All publishers pick a point that
they hope will move the most books. How they decide is personal to
them, but they have no motivation to price it at a point that won't
maximize their profits. If they'd thought 10 times as many people
would buy the book at half the price, I'm sure they'd have done it.
(CLHS is mostly taking up the slack at the low end, so their price is
probably only catching "serious buyers". And so their price is
probably rational for the number of purchasers they expect to find, in
order to cover their editing and production costs.)
> As it is publicly avaliable in HTML format I'd hardly call it hidden.
> I use it to look things up and this seems the most convenient format
> for that.
The HTML document is not a work of the committee. It was created
privately by Harlequin (and is now the property of LispWorks Ltd.).
It is available to read, but not to modify.
The TeX sources have a different status, but it's not easy to crisply
summarize.
On Mar 1, 3:42 am, Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com> wrote:
> It is those elements I've enumerated that I understand to
> be what ANSI has copyrighted.
This part has confused me in the past - while I suppose it is not in
question that these elements are copyrighted by ANSI, both the
existence of the Hyperspec itself and the response to inquiries Camm
et. al. made that he posted <a href="http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/
html/axiom-developer/2007-06/msg00456.html">here</a> would seem to
suggest that ANSI does in fact have (or at least believes they have)
the copyright authority to allow licensed use of the entire
content.
> What I find unusual is that anyone cares. With most other languages,
> the standard is never seen by end users. People write other documents
> that are seen so that users won't have to see the standard. (And CLHS
> is already available for those who do want to see what is effectively,
> though not actually, the text of the standard.) So what is the driving
> force to care?
Personally for me, it is the possibility of the implementation of a
Lisp in the literate programming style of Knuth. While it would be
possible to do this "from scratch" in an academic style citing various
sources, being able to actually include the ANSI text as a starting
point would make the job many orders of magnitude easier.
No doubt there are other motivations (an obvious one is assuring more
types of functionality are available across different lisps and that
more behaviors between them are the same, which could be achieved by
having a "post-ANSI" spec that, official or not, it would be in
everyone's best interest to support.) For myself it is the literate
lisp idea, but I'm probably in the vast minority.
> Wouldn't the energy spent worrying about this be better spent on
> writing so-called "killer apps" that would make CL more popular not
> through showing people its cool definition but showing people its use?
If popularity is the goal. In my case, the literate lisp is the goal
- popularity is secondary.
> What stands between me (or anyone) and commercial success is not
> having yet another copy of the same language definition in some new
> format.
Quite true. However, commercial success is not the only motivator.
For some, it is probably not even a significant motivator.
> When I think of what it would take to "salvage the TeX sources" and
> "maintain the spec" I just think "how much better would that time,
> money, and energy be spent if spent on doing something, rather than
> documenting something? ... and not even documenting the doing of
> something new, but documenting the thing already made now over a dozen
> years ago..."
One of the attractions of Lisp is that it seems to have solved many
fundamental problems so well that it is worth the time to document
them properly - "new" is not always better. Perhaps a better
documentation of lisp will help people to understand why it is worth
the trouble to learn it and build it up.
Be that as it may - it seems unlikely there will be significant
movement on this issue for some time. Perhaps eventually a lisp
community will form orthogonal to common lisp that creates and
maintains their own standard, sort of the way Scheme maintains their
spec but with all source forms open and freely available. An immense
amount of work and a departure from Common Lisp, but not completely
without precedent.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Common Lisp spec from ANSI - they are lost!
Date:
Message-ID: <umypip2jo.fsf@nhplace.com>
C Y <···········@yahoo.com> writes:
> On Mar 1, 3:42 am, Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com> wrote:
>
> > It is those elements I've enumerated that I understand to
> > be what ANSI has copyrighted.
>
> This part has confused me in the past - while I suppose it is not in
> question that these elements are copyrighted by ANSI, both the
> existence of the Hyperspec itself and the response to inquiries Camm
> et. al. made that he posted <a href="http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/
> html/axiom-developer/2007-06/msg00456.html">here</a> would seem to
> suggest that ANSI does in fact have (or at least believes they have)
> the copyright authority to allow licensed use of the entire
> content.
I can't say what they do or don't think, or why.
And I'm not a lawyer. I've had to read up on some aspects of IP law
along the way in life, but my knowledge is not formal, complete, nor
at this point even especially recent. I sometimes know useful questions
to ask lawyers, but I'm not a source of authority that anyone should rely
on to make any material decisions about this.
Like anyone, I have my guesses about the nature of things, but for
various reasons I won't go into them here in this forum. I will say,
though, that I don't regard the statement you made to be in conflict
with what I said.
Let me take a neutral example, and pose some thought questions. Maybe
someone with some formal legal training is listening in and can offer
some hints about how this kind of thing is generally dealt with.
Here's the hypothetical: If I write a book, I own the copyright. If
you ask to make a derivative work that will contain a glowing
introduction and otherwise include my document verbatim, my
understanding is that (having my permission to make derivative works)
you can copyright the result. That copyright, as I understand it,
means I cannot automatically copy your work--you are free to decide
how to manage it (subject to whatever terms my license of use to you
attached). So here's one question: Do you believe you have the
copyright authority to allow licensed use of the entire content? My
understanding is that the law will say yes, though I emphasize that I
could be wrong. Second question: Does your ability to use that
content imply that you can prevent my use of the original text that
was included in order to make yours? My understanding is that the law
says you cannot prohibit me (unless I've expressly given you an
exclusive license, which might change things), though again I might be
wrong.
> > What I find unusual is that anyone cares. With most other languages,
> > the standard is never seen by end users. People write other documents
> > that are seen so that users won't have to see the standard. (And CLHS
> > is already available for those who do want to see what is effectively,
> > though not actually, the text of the standard.) So what is the driving
> > force to care?
>
> Personally for me, it is the possibility of the implementation of a
> Lisp in the literate programming style of Knuth. [...]
Thanks much for taking the time to add the explanations of this and
other stuff that were your motivations behind your questions. I don't
have time to respond to that right now, but it was useful to read. I
have a lot more to say on this, but I really find it tedious to post
here on topics like this "casually" since I am ever conscious of the
permanently archiving nature of this forum.
I recently wrote mail to the organizers of next year's Lisp conference
saying I would actually be willing to give a detailed account of this
for that venue if they wanted me to speak on it. I have no idea what
the conference theme will be or who they're thinking of getting.
There are a number of issues and events that occurred to me along the
way. I've wanted to talk about for a while and haven't really had the
time and motivation to prepare a definitive account. It's something
I'd like to have done a long time ago, but there seems to always be a
reason to put it off. Even if that forum is yet again a bit far off,
that might be a good forcing function, and the time between now and
then might be needed to prepare appropriate remarks. (If anyone else
thinks such a thing would be of interest to them, I guess they could
let either me or the conference organizers know.)
On 01 Mar 2008 16:17:15 -0500, Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com>
wrote:
>C Y <···········@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> On Mar 1, 3:42 am, Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com> wrote:
>>
>> > It is those elements I've enumerated that I understand to
>> > be what ANSI has copyrighted.
>>
>> This part has confused me in the past - while I suppose it is not in
>> question that these elements are copyrighted by ANSI, both the
>> existence of the Hyperspec itself and the response to inquiries Camm
>> et. al. made that he posted <a href="http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/
>> html/axiom-developer/2007-06/msg00456.html">here</a> would seem to
>> suggest that ANSI does in fact have (or at least believes they have)
>> the copyright authority to allow licensed use of the entire
>> content.
>
>I can't say what they do or don't think, or why.
>
>And I'm not a lawyer. I've had to read up on some aspects of IP law
>along the way in life, but my knowledge is not formal, complete, nor
>at this point even especially recent. I sometimes know useful questions
>to ask lawyers, but I'm not a source of authority that anyone should rely
>on to make any material decisions about this.
>
>Like anyone, I have my guesses about the nature of things, but for
>various reasons I won't go into them here in this forum. I will say,
>though, that I don't regard the statement you made to be in conflict
>with what I said.
>
>Let me take a neutral example, and pose some thought questions. Maybe
>someone with some formal legal training is listening in and can offer
>some hints about how this kind of thing is generally dealt with.
>
>Here's the hypothetical: If I write a book, I own the copyright. If
>you ask to make a derivative work that will contain a glowing
>introduction and otherwise include my document verbatim, my
>understanding is that (having my permission to make derivative works)
>you can copyright the result. That copyright, as I understand it,
>means I cannot automatically copy your work--you are free to decide
>how to manage it (subject to whatever terms my license of use to you
>attached). So here's one question: Do you believe you have the
>copyright authority to allow licensed use of the entire content? My
>understanding is that the law will say yes, though I emphasize that I
>could be wrong. Second question: Does your ability to use that
>content imply that you can prevent my use of the original text that
>was included in order to make yours? My understanding is that the law
>says you cannot prohibit me (unless I've expressly given you an
>exclusive license, which might change things), though again I might be
>wrong.
IANAL but my understanding of copyright is this:
A derivative work has its own copyright separate from the original
document. However, the included material's copyright is still in
force - the derivative has only licensed use of it. The holder of the
derivative copyright controls his own original work (the additions)
and distribution of the combined work subject to the terms of the
inclusion license.
So, the derivative owner may potentially be able to license a second
source for verbatim copies of the combined work, and can license
independent use of his original contributions, but can not license any
further use of the included material. Someone wishing to make a
secondary derivative based upon the first would have to obtain
separate inclusion licenses for the original material and for the
additions made to it (unless the original and all derivatives leading
to the contemplated new work are explicitly public domain).
George
--
for email reply remove "/" from address
On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:57:53 -0500, D Herring
<········@at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
>Blake McBride wrote:
>> I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
>...
>> Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
>...
>> And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
>> student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
>
>Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources and
>maintain the spec? I took a stab at converting them to pdfLaTeX (with
>indices and hyperlink goodness) but never shook out all the typos
>introduced by the conversion and mass search-and-replace.
>
>Who owns the copyright anyway?
ANSI.
>ANSI borrowed from Steele; Pitman et
>al shaped the spec and wrote the hyperspec, and for the past many
>years the TeX sources have been on public FTP.
Looking at them yourself is arguably a Fair Use.
Standards organizations have some special non-discrimination duties
under copyright law - ie. they can't deny any persons or groups from
legally obtaining a copy - but the document copyrights are no
different from any other.
>Ownership issues aside, is anyone in the ownership chain trigger-happy
>enough to sue for infringement (assuming derivative docs dropped the
>ANSI endorsement but maintained acknowledgment)?
I'm not aware of ANSI ever having sued over unauthorized reproduction
of a standard document, but both ISO and IEEE have done so repeatedly.
So it's likely that ANSI has also, only with less publicity.
>IIRC, others have already converted the hyperspec to other formats; is
>there any reason to hold back on the original TeX?
Regardless of availability, those sources belong to ANSI. IANAL but I
doubt anyone will complain about very limited reproduction such as
converting it for your own use, or for a small selected group. OTOH,
you _are_ quite likely to get grief if you make your conversion
publicly available and particularly if you advertise it.
George
--
for email reply remove "/" from address
On Feb 27, 7:22 am, George Neuner <·········@/comcast.net> wrote:
> >Who owns the copyright anyway?
>
> ANSI.
What is the copyright status of the final public draft of ANSI
X3.226-1994, which Erik Naggum put up here: http://naggum.no/ANSI-CL.tar.gz
? Does "final *public* draft" imply that it is in the public domain?
(I can't seem to find a copyright statement.) In that case I would
recommend it to the OP as a good alternative, which is very similar to
the official standards document, as far as I can guess.
Michael
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:51:01 -0800, Michael Ben-Yosef wrote:
> X3.226-1994, which Erik Naggum put up here: http://naggum.no/ANSI-CL.tar.gz
Thank you Erik. All is forgiven!
Tim
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:51:01 -0800 (PST), Michael Ben-Yosef
<········@mweb.co.za> wrote:
>On Feb 27, 7:22 am, George Neuner <·········@/comcast.net> wrote:
>> >Who owns the copyright anyway?
>>
>> ANSI.
>
>What is the copyright status of the final public draft of ANSI
>X3.226-1994, which Erik Naggum put up here: http://naggum.no/ANSI-CL.tar.gz
>? Does "final *public* draft" imply that it is in the public domain?
>(I can't seem to find a copyright statement.) In that case I would
>recommend it to the OP as a good alternative, which is very similar to
>the official standards document, as far as I can guess.
>
I haven't looked at the file(s) in question, but if Erik isn't one of
the authors he probably is violating ANSI's copyright.
Technically, draft authors are considered to be commissioned by the
organization and thus all work on behalf of the standard document
belongs to the organization. It doesn't actually matter that the
authors may be volunteers not paid for the work.
Ordinarily, an author assigns reproduction rights to a publisher for a
period of time - after which the rights revert to the author.
However, standard documents are technically never out of print and
thus the author must assign perpetual reproduction rights to the
organization. There is nothing in the law that prevents an author
from retaining independent reproduction rights, but AFAIK, all the
standard organizations disallow it.
George
--
for email reply remove "/" from address
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Common Lisp spec from ANSI - they are lost!
Date:
Message-ID: <ud4qhhchg.fsf@nhplace.com>
George Neuner <·········@/comcast.net> writes:
> I haven't looked at the file(s) in question, but if Erik isn't one of
> the authors he probably is violating ANSI's copyright.
It's possible, of course.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer. If anyone needs legal advice
to rely upon, the statements you get from me on this matter are not it.
Clearly, by the nature of copyright itself (and the fact that it
attaches upon fixing the work in a medium, which has certainly
occurs), there is copyright involved. I'd not be so quick to assume
the authorship was legally ANSI's, though. There are alternate points
of view on this, and while I'll stop short of alleging that one of
those points of view is correct, I will say I think the issues are
muddy (again in part intrinsic to the US court system since, as far as
I can tell, it does not allow these issues to ever BE definitively
clear until/unless they are formally litigated).
I will also note that the rules for standards committees have changed
over time and the rules in play now may not be the rules we were operating
under then.
In general, it's a topic that is tedious to write about because of the
care one wants to take not to make a misstatement. And I'm not up to it
tonight. So that's really all I have to say.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Common Lisp spec from ANSI - they are lost!
Date:
Message-ID: <uablihkr7.fsf@nhplace.com>
George Neuner <·········@/comcast.net> writes:
> On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:57:53 -0500, D Herring
> <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
>
> >Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources [...]
> >Who owns the copyright anyway?
>
> ANSI.
I don't want to say firmly, but I am willing to say (and I said it under
separate cover, but am repeating myself here because it was included in
other text I wanted to reply to and I like to avoid this being too clearcut).
The sources on the net are not the sources for the ANSI CL document,
and I wouldn't look first to them for ownership. These sources were
privately commissioned at great cost by a number of the lisp vendors
of the era, some of which have since disappeared (although their
assets, which would include the copyright, have probably transferred
and probably still have owners).
> >ANSI borrowed from Steele;
Steele expressly permitted CLTL to be used as a base document for the
effort we made in defining CL. At some point, he expressly disclaimed
interest in the resulting document, asserting that it had sufficiently
changed that he no longer regarded it as a derivative work.
> >Pitman et al shaped the spec
As an independent, privately funded exercise that was kept legally
clean and disconnected from the committee work. The details are a
little complicated, but no ANSI committee wrote the spec.
> >and wrote the hyperspec,
Appropriate permissions were obtained in writing from ANSI for the
creation of CLHS. CLHS is an officially authorized derivative work
of ANSI CL.
> > and for the past many
> >years the TeX sources have been on public FTP.
Those sources are the results of private funding. The intent had been
to put them into the public domain, but a number of events
(bankruptcies, etc.) happened that made it difficult to do that.
> Looking at them yourself is arguably a Fair Use.
CLHS contains its own terms of service that include your right to view
and copy it under some expressed limitations, which include a requirement
not to modify, subset, repackage, etc. See its specific wording if you
need an appropriate legal expression of this.
> Standards organizations have some special non-discrimination duties
> under copyright law - ie. they can't deny any persons or groups from
> legally obtaining a copy - but the document copyrights are no
> different from any other.
Right.
> >Ownership issues aside, is anyone in the ownership chain trigger-happy
> >enough to sue for infringement (assuming derivative docs dropped the
> >ANSI endorsement but maintained acknowledgment)?
>
> I'm not aware of ANSI ever having sued over unauthorized reproduction
> of a standard document, but both ISO and IEEE have done so repeatedly.
> So it's likely that ANSI has also, only with less publicity.
I would hope that if anyone had gotten sued, they'd have shared the
knowledge! The notion that such a thing would be low-profile is odd.
I guess it could happen, but can you say what motivation they'd have
to do it that way?
> >IIRC, others have already converted the hyperspec to other formats; is
> >there any reason to hold back on the original TeX?
>
> Regardless of availability, those sources belong to ANSI.
ANSI was never at any time in possession of the TeX sources.
They wanted PostScript and that's what they got.
> IANAL but I
> doubt anyone will complain about very limited reproduction such as
> converting it for your own use, or for a small selected group.
Well, I'm not a lawyer either, so I can't really say one way or
another. (All of what I'm saying here is just my personal
speculations, and not based on any credential.) But I'd assume that
to complain, one would first want reasonable confidence they had
standing to complain. If they weren't sure, and misfired, it might be
quite embarrassing for them. Still, deciding it was therefore ok
because you imagined someone too gunshy to proceed against you sounds
ill-advised, too. So I don't know that one can make any useful
conclusions from this info at all.
> OTOH,
> you _are_ quite likely to get grief if you make your conversion
> publicly available and particularly if you advertise it.
Hmmm. This sounds remarkably close to advising someone that anything
they do that doesn't get found out probably won't get
prosecuted... which is a sort of truism, and yet isn't really
something I'd feel comfortable advancing as a theory of ethics.
Copyright is not expressed in terms of being ok depending on whether
someone finds out or not. Things are either legal or they aren't ...
don't you think? There might be other arguments to play--fair use,
for example. But fair use, just to continue that example, doesn't
hinge on the issue of whether someone finds out, does it? ( I don't
recall that being among the 4 criteria.) I just don't know where you
are going here.
On 01 Mar 2008 04:11:08 -0500, Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com>
wrote:
>George Neuner <·········@/comcast.net> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:57:53 -0500, D Herring
>> <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
>>
>> >Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources [...]
>> >Who owns the copyright anyway?
>>
>> ANSI.
>
>I don't want to say firmly, but I am willing to say (and I said it under
>separate cover, but am repeating myself here because it was included in
>other text I wanted to reply to and I like to avoid this being too clearcut).
>
>The sources on the net are not the sources for the ANSI CL document,
>and I wouldn't look first to them for ownership. These sources were
>privately commissioned at great cost by a number of the lisp vendors
>of the era, some of which have since disappeared (although their
>assets, which would include the copyright, have probably transferred
>and probably still have owners).
It was said earlier that (at least some of) the sources are drafts of
the document. The question then is "who owns the drafts". IME with
IEEE, the committee owns the drafts - not the authors. ANSI may be
different.
>> > and for the past many
>> >years the TeX sources have been on public FTP.
>
>Those sources are the results of private funding. The intent had been
>to put them into the public domain, but a number of events
>(bankruptcies, etc.) happened that made it difficult to do that.
Intent notwithstanding, the question always is whether the current
holder of the document has legal rights to distribute it. If the
document was explicitly put into PD there is no problem. However, if
it was as yet unreleased at the time of the "event" that forestalled
it, the original intent is meaningless. In that case, it remains the
property of the author and/or the company. The author could choose to
release it himself if the company doesn't object.
>> >IIRC, others have already converted the hyperspec to other formats; is
>> >there any reason to hold back on the original TeX?
>>
>> Regardless of availability, those sources belong to ANSI.
>
>ANSI was never at any time in possession of the TeX sources.
>
>They wanted PostScript and that's what they got.
If the Postscript was generated from the TeX, it is source by
transitivity - the Postscript is in copyright terms a "derivative".
>> IANAL but I
>> doubt anyone will complain about very limited reproduction such as
>> converting it for your own use, or for a small selected group.
>
>Well, I'm not a lawyer either, so I can't really say one way or
>another. (All of what I'm saying here is just my personal
>speculations, and not based on any credential.) But I'd assume that
>to complain, one would first want reasonable confidence they had
>standing to complain. If they weren't sure, and misfired, it might be
>quite embarrassing for them. Still, deciding it was therefore ok
>because you imagined someone too gunshy to proceed against you sounds
>ill-advised, too. So I don't know that one can make any useful
>conclusions from this info at all.
>
>> OTOH,
>> you _are_ quite likely to get grief if you make your conversion
>> publicly available and particularly if you advertise it.
>
>Hmmm. This sounds remarkably close to advising someone that anything
>they do that doesn't get found out probably won't get
>prosecuted... which is a sort of truism, and yet isn't really
>something I'd feel comfortable advancing as a theory of ethics.
>Copyright is not expressed in terms of being ok depending on whether
>someone finds out or not. Things are either legal or they aren't ...
>don't you think? There might be other arguments to play--fair use,
>for example. But fair use, just to continue that example, doesn't
>hinge on the issue of whether someone finds out, does it? ( I don't
>recall that being among the 4 criteria.) I just don't know where you
>are going here.
It was intended as a warning. But as always IANAL.
Copyright law recognizes certain limited uses as non-infringing - one
of which is personal education, where "personal" can apply to limited
groups as well as to individuals. The problems come when the
"limited" group becomes "too large" (up the court to decide) and the
copyright holder becomes aware of it, or when distribution may be
unlimited as in the case of making a file available on the Internet.
George
--
for email reply remove "/" from address
On Feb 26, 9:57 pm, D Herring <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> wrote:
> Blake McBride wrote:
> > I purchased a PDF copy of the Common Lisp spec from ANSI at:
> ...
> > Be warned, the quality of the document is awful...
> ...
> > And these people are the keepers of American Standards? A High School
> > student with an $800 PC could do a better job than them.
>
> Is it finally time for the community to salvage the TeX sources and
> maintain the spec? I took a stab at converting them to pdfLaTeX (with
> indices and hyperlink goodness) but never shook out all the typos
> introduced by the conversion and mass search-and-replace.
>
> Who owns the copyright anyway? ANSI borrowed from Steele; Pitman et
> al shaped the spec and wrote the hyperspec, and for the past many
> years the TeX sources have been on public FTP.
I have tried to summarize what I could find on this issue here (IANAL,
other usual warnings - I'm not an expert on these matters, just wanted
to save time later if someone wants to re-start the issue):
http://wiki.alu.org/Project_FreeSpec
On Feb 29, 3:23 pm, C Y <···········@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I have tried to summarize what I could find on this issue here (IANAL,
> other usual warnings - I'm not an expert on these matters, just wanted
> to save time later if someone wants to re-start the issue):
>
> http://wiki.alu.org/Project_FreeSpec
Thanks for your work here. I'd forgotten about this page. It does
paint a rather sad picture, though.
Michael
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Common Lisp spec from ANSI - they are lost!
Date:
Message-ID: <uir06hobf.fsf@nhplace.com>
D Herring <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> writes:
> IIRC, others have already converted the hyperspec to other formats;
Fyi, the HyperSpec license expressly forbids that. LispWorks Ltd. is
the legal owner of the copyright on the HyperSpec and the terms under
which it may be copied are spelled out in the document itself. See
the terms of use in the document for details, but you should expect to
find (among other restrictions) that the license of use does not
permit changing its format.