On Wed, 28 May 2025, 00:42 Ville Voutilainen via Std-Proposals, <
std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 May 2025 at 02:33, Oliver Hunt via Std-Proposals
> <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > On May 27, 2025, at 7:06 PM, Frederick Virchanza Gotham via
> Std-Proposals <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, May 26, 2025 at 4:48 AM René Ferdinand Rivera Morell wrote:
> >
> >
> > I do not give you permission to use my copyrighted works to train an AI.
> > And I doubt that ISO would give you permission to use ISO/IEC copyrighted
> > works to train an AI. If you do, or have, gone down that road.. Remove my
> > copyrighted content from your AI data immediately.
> >
> >
> >
> > I haven't read the small print on what you agreed to when you emailed
> > Nevin to get a document number, but I'll give consideration to it
> > before releasing version 1 of my program. I think you retain the
> > copyright of what you wrote, but obviously if you submit a paper,
> > other people have to be able to work with it. I can't just write a
> > paper and submit it and mandate that everyone has to be drinking
> > decaffeinated coffee when they read it, or that they can store it on
> > an USB stick but only if the USB stick was purchased on a night when
> > there was a full moon.
> >
> > Well now you have one person saying that they do not give you permission
> to use their work.
> >
> > For you to copy people’s work you need to have the right to do so, I’m
> not sure what the exact rules for ISO are, but I can guarantee they aren’t
> “papers are in the public domain” which means you need the permission of
> the copyright owners. I’m not sure if that’s the authors or ISO, but it
> sounds like you haven’t even tried to find out, and instead were planning
> on copying papers without the consent of the authors or the copyright
> owners (which may or may not be different[1]), and then claiming that your
> “AI” is something other than a copy of other people’s work.
> >
> > Even if we were to try to assume goodwill on your part, when someone
> said you did not have their consent to steal their work, you said “I don’t
> care, I’m going to do it anyway”. That you think that is a reasonable, or
> even remotely ethical, behavior is absurd. Step 1 of being in any community
> is demonstrating some amount of respect for others in the community, and
> you haven’t demonstrated even the slightest semblance of that.
> >
> > Just to be clear, you also don’t have my consent to steal any of my work
> either.
> >
> > —Oliver
> >
> >
> >
> > [1] Per https://www.iso.org/copyright.html all ISO documentation is
> copyright protected, whether ISO has copyright ownership of a proposal, or
> if the author retains it (I’m unclear whether a proposal is considered an
> ISO publication), is moot: it’s covered by copyright either ISO or the
> authors, and so copying the work requires permission of the copyright owner.
>
> The proposals aren't ISO publications, they are not in any ISO system
> (that's why they are P-numbered, not N-numbered), so the only possible
> copyright holders
> for them are their authors.
>
> IANAL, of course. Don't take that as actual legal advice. It's my
> understanding of the situation where there is no copyright assignment
> being made,
> and no distribution or other kind of license being stated.
>
> The copyright of the proposed wording transfers to ISO when it's
> incorporated into the draft and subsequently to a standard , and
> proposal authors understand that,
> but they still hold the sole copyright to their proposal papers,
> because nothing else is stated.
>

Right, authors retain copyright of papers, and as Oliver said, they're
certainly not in the public domain. That's a specific legal term that means
they're *not* covered by copyright, so you can't say they're copyrighted
and also in the public domain, that's a contradiction.

The permission to redistribute the papers (which is needed for them to be
hosted online and sent out to the committee) does not imply permission to
modify them and create derived works (such as a training set for an LLM). I
believe you would need permission from the individual authors for that.

To be clear, I don't think you have any implied permission, the default is
no permission, and you would have to obtain it from every author. (For the
avoidance of doubt, I don't give permission for any of my papers to be used
for training LLMs.)

I don't know what the legal situation is if you never share the work based
on that training set, and it's only for your personal use on your own
computer. It might be that we can't prevent you from doing that. But
hosting the service online for others to use would be distributing derived
works without permission.