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Making money from information standards: Legal issues and cost structures in XML-related projects 1

In order to profit financially from information standardisation, awareness concerning legal issues as well as cost structures is a necessity. Of course, commercial interests do not govern every organisation involved in XML-related projects. Nevertheless, cost is a critical factor in today’s information market. The information standardisation process is on-going and has matured over the years. It covers a wide variety of topics and interest groups. Although striving for global applicability, many initiatives are clearly characterised by their national origin. The XML.org registry encompasses over two-hundred submissions divided into more than forty different categories. But one aspect is consistently ignored in many of the entries, and that is the legal aspects of these proposed vocabularies. The cost structure of a vocabulary–defined as the expected cost involved in implementation and interpretation–is determined not only by technical aspects, but also by legal and organisational ones. We argue that the introduction of a legal perspective in the process of information standardisation is essential for making many of the standards profitable. We have analysed a subset of the different standards (one from each category) in order to establish which standards would require legal analysis and what such an analysis ought to focus on. More precisely, we recognize legal issues relating to intellectual property rights, privacy protection, liability, financial law, and so forth. A major point in our presentation is the business incentive of eliminating unnecessary legal costs associated with poor vocabulary design. In response to this manifested need for legal awareness, we present the on-going development of a legal reviewing process in LISA (Legal Information Standards Action–network). Its purpose is to make available to vocabulary groups legal reviews of their proposals in a research environment with the prospect of ensuring higher quality and more widespread usability.