Common Lisp HyperSpec

Hi Guys,

there is the Common Lisp ANSI Standard which you can buy. There is also the Common Lisp HyperSpec which is the standard in Form of a web page. How is this possible? Do they pay? I'm interested in this, because I have a website with my own interpreter and want to document it. Is it allowed to integrate the ANSI standard content in my Website? If not, is there a way to make it possible?

The HyperSpec's legal notices just say that they got "permission"—whatever that means. You'll want to read this page, on something called Project FreeSpec—lots of research there.

I finally found out about the mutual rights' relationship (actually it's also noted in CLHS), CLHS existence is permitted by ANSI and X3. The stance on the distribution of CLHS is also described there, I'm by no means an expert on copyright laws, but I'd say that you can use it in a complete and unchagned form for non-commercial activities and it's worth noting the years next to the copyright mark.

Thank you for your research.
At first sight it looks like I'm not allowed to rework the pages. For now linking to the original pages is enough. What do you think? Would it be OK to write my own documentation and cite the ANSI Standard directly or even the HyperSpec? I would copy the description of the function/variable/etc, adding a footnote.


Another point is that my interpreter does not support all common lisp functionality at the moment. I'm not sure if it's allowed to remove content from a copy of the HyperSpec, like links to other functions, or entries.

Only the formatting is copyrighted by ANSI, not the content. The standards textual content is in the public domain according to Kent M. Pitman.
He writes in Common Lisp: The untold story that he was asked to transfer copyright to ANSI committee, but he refused since it wasn't his to give.

6.2 ANSI and the Copyright

I was employed by Harlequin, telecommuting from my home, while finalizing the standard. My liaison at ANSI had contacted me about some small edits they wanted made prior to formal publication of the already-approved standard, primarily changes to the look of headers and the fact that a bunch of page numbers were wrong in the appendix.

Oh, and they wanted us to give them the copyright.

A discussion ensued in which the following suggestions were made. It might be that I made a more contemporaneous record of the conversation, but I have thus far been unable to locate that record, so this reconstruction of the conversation is from memory and may be wrong in minor details. Also, I will use quotation marks here in order to make the presentation more readable, but those marks should not be construed to imply precise quotation, merely to imply the notion of someone speaking to someone else. I think this captures the essential character of what happened.

“I can’t do that,” I explained by phone one day, remembering my problems with MIT and copyrights from years before. “My work has been done under contract with a great many people who have paid for the work to be done, on condition that it be placed into the public domain.”

The person I was talking to alleged that standards are owned by the committee that makes them. This flew in the face of my understanding of how copyright worked. I thought copyright was owned by the author or, when the author was paid to do the writing, by the entity that had paid the author.

A court case was cited that sounded dubious to me. Since it was a phone call, I have no written record of the precise case. My vague recollection was that it was a regional case, nothing that had gone to the Supreme Court. Allegedly, the case created some precedent for the notion that if a committee writes something as a group, the committee holds copyright in the result.

“Oh,” I explained, “we didn’t do it that way. Our committee only voted on the truth of things, not on the text.”

Having previously done a great deal of reading on the issue of copyright, I knew that the US Code for copyright [USC17] is rather specific on this point. The code pretty clearly says that “Copyright protection subsists [...] in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression” and goes on to say, “In no case does copyright protection for an original work extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” In other words, copyright protects the form of an idea but not the idea itself. And since X3J13 had concerned itself with the creation of documents about truth, not with the creation of documents telling me what to write, X3J13 as a group had specifically and intentionally elected not to be an author of the resulting document.

“Copyright,” I explained, “covers the form of text, not the truth. So it doesn’t seem likely that such a court precedent would apply.”

“Also,” I continued, “X3J13 isn’t a legal entity. So we don’t think it could own anything. That’s why we wrote contracts among ourselves to accomplish the funding of the project, not contracts with the committee.”

“And anyway,” I went on, “the cash flow is in the wrong direction. You [ANSI] are taking in money for X3J13 fees. You’re not paying us, we’re paying you. Maybe if you were paying us, you might own our work. But we’re paying you for membership. Moreover, we’ve paid about $425,000 in enumerable expenses for salary of people who worked on making the standard. We bought the creation of the standard and we’re not giving it away to ANSI.”

“We, as a community, expect to continue to own the spec. My understanding is that copyright typically resides with whoever pays for the creation, so I doubt that could be ANSI. My recollection is that I told them I was surprised that they could have built their business on such a strange foundation—the strength of a single court case.

“We could just decide to go ahead and make the changes ourselves,” I was told. “Oh,” I explained, “that wouldn’t be good. Our names are on the document, you wouldn’t want to be publishing something we didn’t write under our name. That sounds like it could be fraud or something.”

“Well, we could use what you’ve already given us.” “Gee, I said, it has all those headers you don’t like and that index with all the wrong page numbers. I doubt you’d want that.”

“Well, we could just retract the standard. It’s not published yet. We could just not publish it. Oh, I said, that would be very helpful to us because Steele went and published CLTL2 and it’s created a lot of confusion in the market. We’d be happy to just use that, since that’s what everyone is implementing right now anyway.”

“So what do you suggest?” they finally asked.

“Well,” I suggested, “I’m not a lawyer, but my guess is that if we gave you something without giving you the explicit copyright and you just wrote your own copyright on it, no one would question that. I can’t promise you that, of course, but it seems like your best option. You could probably take a page from the way West Law does US court cases and copyright the headers and the page breaks, not the underlying text, and then say that although the main document is not yours, the official copy, the one that is the standard, is the one with all those headers of yours, and that can only be obtained from you.”

“But, bottom line,” I explained, “I’m not authorized to sign over any copyright to you and I’m not going to do that.”

Huh, good to know the terms and the story.