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Facts cannot be copyrighted. Phrasing the description of YYYY-MM-DD strings and the like in a different way is likely sufficient to be freely available.

Now, whether that's actually enough to convince the administrators to keep it up and risk the time and expense of a lawsuit is another matter entirely - in practice, anything that rightsholders threaten to sue over is probably banned, regardless of the actual legal status.



> Facts cannot be copyrighted. Phrasing the description of YYYY-MM-DD strings and the like in a different way is likely sufficient to be freely available.

To my knowledge, wholesale 'rephrasings' of standards documents have never been undertaken, even where royalty-free access to a document is in relatively high demand, such as with the C standard. StackOverflow ends up being the substitute for the standards document.

As well as being a lot of work, it would open the door to small inaccuracies. A lot of work goes into 'laywering' the exact phrasing of such documents.


> To my knowledge, wholesale 'rephrasings' of standards documents have never been undertaken, even where royalty-free access to a document is in relatively high demand, such as with the C standard.

No, they have. As a specific example, ETSI TS 102 221 contains enough of ISO/IEC 7816-2, 7816-3, and 7816-4 that one can implement a compatible device.


Interesting, thanks. Do ETSI do this in the name of making the ISO standard freely accessible, or is it done for some other reason?


No, from what I understand it's done to standardize a lot of telecom stuff across Europe. I think they're somehow related to the GSM, but I haven't been in the telecom industry in well over a decade so my memory is fuzzy there.




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