Most people will likely see this only on online forms that lazily just populate their country dropdowns from (pirated copies) of the official ISO database.
Yes, but if you actually try to download the collection (link right above that text), you are presented with a form to pay CHF 300 for this data.
Now I am not a copyright lawyer but this is how I understand it: this entire database is a copyrighted work owned by ISO. If you pay them CHF 300 you can download the database and then use use it freely. But when you gather that entire dataset (transformed or not) back to a full database format, it is still a derived work - the copyright of which is owned by ISO.
This is of course completely hair splitting as you will not see ISO coming after anyone spreading the database in any format (it would be a PR disaster). But if you asked the opinion of a corporate lawyer, they might say you technically need to pay ISO before you can use a copy of the entire database in your app. And I bet that's why they have the form to pay the CHF 300 if someone somewhere has a compliance department telling them to be 100% sure they are not breaching any copyrights..
Maybe someone who actually knows anything about copyright law can comment..
> It should be noted that this material is ultimately sourced from ISO and their rights and licensing policy is somewhat unclear. As this is a short, simple database of facts there is a strong argument that no rights can subsist in this collection. However, ISO state on their site:
>> ISO makes the list of alpha-2 country codes available for internal use and non-commercial purposes free of charge.
> This carries the implication (though not spelled out) that other uses are not permitted and that, therefore, there may be rights preventing further general use and reuse.
Likewise, if ISO says they allow "free-of-charge use" of the database, it implies their permission and allowance is required to use it in the first place. This implies that if you embed the database to your app, it contains proprietary material by ISO. This limits your rights for example re-licensing it, as you can not re-license without consent from ISO, the copyright holder.
Again - this is only a theoretical problem, yet the ambiguity is rather annoying to a pedant.
Although I'm not a copyright laywer, I did previously work for an intellectual property services company. The country codes collection is a service they provide designed to make it easy to keep country codes up to date. This doesn't negate the "free-of-charge use" of the database. ISO appear to have clarified this almost 20 years ago: http://xml.coverpages.org/ISOReaffirms.html , and it looks like the situation hasn't changed.
I don't see how your rights would be limited by including it in your app. You can just say the copyright to the ISO database belongs to ISO, but is free-of-charge, and the copyright to the code written by you belongs to you, which is not free of charge, or any license you wish.
Edit: Because I can't reply - CC0, a public domain - like license was released in 2009, well after the clarification of their "free-of-charge use" license.
It would be much better if they simply dedicated this database to the public domain.
In the "clarification" they indeed seem to consider that the database is covered by their copyright, and any free use is subject to their continued benevolence:
> However, ISO and its members do not charge for the use made of the codes contained in these standards, subject to this being consistent with ISO's copyright.
We're way off in speculation land here, but if CH law is like DE law, IIRC it's one of the countries that releasing to the public domain isn't really possible (which is why CC0 exists)
The specific rules around copyright of facts is probably extremely country specific. The US tends to be on the more liberal/not copyrightable side here than Europe.
