Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techdragon | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those standards I wish we could just unlock as free. We are surrounded by these symbols due to their obvious utility, to the point where I routinely see them used unknowingly on things that cannot possibly be legal given the copyrights inherent in the original source material, yet because many people not working in an industry that comes across such standards documents as part of standards compliance... may not even have realised they come from a standard they have to pay for!

They go on to produce work containing these symbols in varying degrees of modification for so many reasons, its just bloody pointless at this stage to keep these locked away.

- ISO 3758

- ISO 3864

- ISO 7000

- ISO 7001

- ISO 7010

and more.

You can even browse them all... https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search yet you cannot use them without paying.

We live in a world plastered with these symbols, the very purpose of which is to be an international agreed upon symbolic language for safety and utility, yet we lock them away behind a nominal paywall that cannot possibly be a lucrative revenue stream... its just daft bordering on hypocritical.

Id go so far as to say these symbols they belong in the open standardised like Unicode, for all to use and easily available for clear compatibility, delegated from ISO to another body that can be more open if their hands are tied for some reason.

All the signs in the article are listed as "Public domain".

Edit: this is discussed on https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/8586/can-i...

> given the copyrights inherent in the original source material

It's not obvious to me that (under US law) these are copyright protected. It may be a similar case as typefaces vs. fonts. The language on the ISO website suggests, at least to me, that you are paying for particular files in particular formats and are not licensing a protected symbol. Also the language in the ISO standards describes abstract symbols, and afaik there is no normative requirement to use the exact images from the standard / ISO to be compliant.

All the signs are marked as public domain or with a CC license on wikipedia. So you definitely wont have to buy the standard.

If you are producing warning signs for selling you might want to buy it to get the true colour data etc.

ISO is a "traditional" international standards body whose members are sovereign entities (well, national standards bodies on behalf of those sovereign entities). If they'd like to pay ISO to give this stuff away I'm sure that would be fine.

Conveniently your government (as one of those sovereign entities) also decides what the laws about "intellectual property" are where you live. If you live in a democracy of some sort, this is in some sense up to you.

But if you live somewhere with like, poverty and kids dying of preventable diseases and so on (which you do, that's basically all of the sovereign entities regardless of whether they've got democracy), I can already guess why they didn't fix those, and the reason to not make ISO standards freely available will be similar: That would cost money.

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