Unicode Licensing – Understanding the Unicode License

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The Unicode Terms of Use state that any software that uses their data files (or a modification of them) should carry the Unicode license references. It seems to me that most Unicode libraries have functions to check whether a character is a digit, a letter, a symbol, etc., and so will contain a modification of the Unicode Data Files (usually in the form of tables). Does that mean the license applies and all applications that use such Unicode libraries should carry the license?

I've checked around, and it appears that very few Unicode programs do carry the license, though arguably most of those that didn't carry the license were from companies that were members of the Unicode consortium (do they get license exemptions?).

Some (e.g., Mozilla) are only "Liaison Members", and while their software do not carry the license (as far as I can tell), they do obviously rely on data derived from those data files. Is Mozilla in breach of the license?

Should we carry the license in all apps that include any form of advanced Unicode support (i.e., are bound to rely on the Unicode data files)? Or is there some form of broad exemption (since very very few programs out there carry the license)?

I've forwarded this question to Unicode staff. I'll post the reply here when/if I get one.

Best Answer

Preliminary remark: I'm not a lawyer any longer, and never specialized myself in laws related to copyrights and intellectual property. If you want an unquestionable answer, you should consult a lawyer.

1. Data and data files are not the same

As it states, the exhibit 1 covers data files:

BY DOWNLOADING, INSTALLING, COPYING OR OTHERWISE USING UNICODE INC.'S DATA FILES [...]

Data files and data itself are not the same. When Microsoft implements uppercase and lowercase methods in .NET Framework, the unicode standard is used, but this doesn't mean that .NET Framework contains, somewhere, the files downloaded from http://www.unicode.org/

Simple illustration of a difference between the data and the support:

Imagine that I create a database with a list of countries, cities and the corresponding post codes. I expose this data through a web service and on my website.

The data itself is in public domain: you can't reasonably copyright the list of countries and ask every person who use such list to pay you or to distribute a copy of your copyright.

On the other hand, nothing forbids for me to enforce a restrictive license on the usage of the web service or the website (especially since I invested a lot of effort while creating this set of data). If I find that an application is scraping my website to download the data, this would be a copyright infringement, and I would be able to sue the person who created the scraper.

2. Data is too vague

If http://www.unicode.org/ stated that the license covers the data itself, it would be very difficult for this organization to enforce such copyright.

Imagine the following method:

public char ToUpper(char c)
{
    string upper = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
    if (upper.Contains(c))
    {
        return c;
    }

    string lower = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
    if (lower.Contains(c))
    {
        return upper[lower.IndexOf(c)];
    }

    throw new OutOfRangeException();
}

Is this a violation of the copyright? Did I actually used the data from http://www.unicode.org/ and I should include the copy of the license in my answer below? Or maybe I just typed those letters myself?

In other words, if data itself was licensed, how far the license could go?

3. Copyright and data

Here are some interesting quotes:

http://www.lib.umich.edu/copyright/facts-and-data: University of Michigan

Copyright law does not apply to facts, data, or ideas. [...]

However, copyright may protect a collection of data as contained in a database or compilation, but only if it meets certain requirements. Simply working really hard to gather the data [...] is not enough. [...]

In order for a database to qualify for copyright protection, the author has to make choices about the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the facts or data, and those choices must be at least a little bit creative. [...]

It is important to remember that even if a database or compilation is arranged with sufficient originality to qualify for copyright protection, the facts and data within that database are still in the public domain.

http://www.ands.org.au/guides/copyright-and-data-awareness.html: Australian National Data Service

A table or compilation, consisting of words, figures or symbols (or a combination of these) is protected if it is

  1. a literary work and

  2. has the required degree of originality.

[...] Copyright applies not to the facts/information itself, but to the particular way the facts/information are presented in the dataset or database.

Those two examples, one concerning USA, the other one - Australia, clearly shows that the data itself, i.e. the unicode symbols with their respective numbers and the attributes such as "is this a digit?" or "is this a capital letter from Cyrillic alphabet?" is not covered by the copyright.

Data files, on the other hand, may be covered by the copyright, depending on their originality. For example, the PDFs you find on http://www.unicode.org/ would be very probably covered by a copyright. If, on the other hand, it is purely question of a CSV associating lowercase characters to uppercase or vice versa, the author of such data would hardly be able to enforce the copyright on it.

Clearly, the ToUpper method I put above is not a violation of http://www.unicode.org/ copyright. Nor the code used by .NET Framework or Firefox, unless those systems contain somewhere inside the data files which are clearly, undoubtedly copied from http://www.unicode.org/ with, optionally, some minor changes.

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