ANSI C Standard online?

[Larry Jones]

In article <1990Mar9.165405.13140 at utzoo.uucp>, henry at utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> ANSI standards are not available in machine-readable form.  This is not
> stupidity or backwardness, but a deliberate policy decision.  The major
> reasons are (a) concern about mutated versions, and (b) concern about
> loss of revenue (sales of standards are the main source of financing
> for ANSI).

At the last X3J11 meeting there was some interesting information
presented that has a direct bearing on this question.

Apparently, there is a member of the Fortran committee who got
fed up with the complaints about the difficulty and expense of
getting documents from Global Engineering, so he started
publicizing that he would make copies and mail them out to all
interested parties at cost.  Now X3 has in the past maintained
that they own all committee documents and any distribution
without their permission is forbidden (which is why the C drafts
weren't published in SIGPLAN Notices, despite the desires of the
editors of that publication and the C committee).  However, the
new head of X3 wanted to be sure he was on solid ground before
taking any action, so he had the lawyers look into the question.

What they discovered is that X3's prior claims are completely
groundless.  Copyright law basically states that the author of a
work owns all the rights unless they are explicitly assigned to
someone else.  No one on any X3 committee has ever signed
anything assigning any rights to either X3 or ANSI, so the
lawyers' conclusion was that neither X3 >nor ANSI< has any
justification for claiming a copyright on either drafts or final
standards.  Thus, X3 has given up the idea of limiting
distribution of drafts.

This leaves us in an interesting position.  As far as I know,
ANSI still believes they own copyrights on standards, but X3
knows they are wrong.  Certainly it is not in the best interest
of anyone to have mutated copies of standards extant, but it
would be beneficial to many to have electronic versions, etc.
So, the bottom line is that you can probably do anything you want
with the final standard, but you will probably have to fight a
legal battle with ANSI sooner or later.
----
Larry Jones                         UUCP: uunet!sdrc!scjones
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