From: António Martins-Tuválkin (tuvalkin@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 28 2006 - 12:41:16 CST
On 2006/11/27, Kenneth Whistler <kenw@sybase.com> wrote:
> Any religious symbol, particularly, is easily subject to
> any number of misuses and abuses that would rile significant
> numbers of folks.
<...>
> But that is utterly beside the point, frankly.
Exactly my point when replying to Kenneth Whistler's statement on 2006.11.22:
>>> If I chose to take the Creative Commons Noncommercial
>>> symbol
<...>
>>> and hijacked it to start advertising links to a tax protest site,
>>> or to a bunch of anarchists advocating the bombing of banks,
>>> I'd probably be hearing shortly from a CC lawyer wanting to
>>> deal with misappropriation of their IP rights
While this may be true, it is, as said «utterly beside the point».
>> After all, the said misusers instead of waiting for
>> the said symbol to be added to Unicode
>> could just start using today U+0024 U+20E0 instead.
>> Then what? How would this be different than a new,
>> sigle character?
>
> Enclosing combining marks have a problematical status in
> the standard.
<...long and interesting explanation snipped...>
> Applying U+20E0 graphically to U+0024 DOLLAR SIGN would
> have this issue, because the dollar sign would still be seen by
> software as a currency sign, in most cases, rather than the
> resulting displayable graphic form being treated as a unitary
> symbol. Note also that a number of circled characters have
> been added to the standard, despite the availability of U+20DD.
OK, but how would this be different than a new, single character?
After all the putative angry lawyers called in by the open source
community would hardely be bothered if the offending glyph was a
"bastard" composite including an enclosing combining mark or a _bona
fide_ character with General_Category=So.
> The ability to represent the Creative Commons Noncommercial
> symbol now with <U+0024, U+20E0> is thus neither here nor
> there as regards whether a proposal to encode it as a unitary
> symbol
Surely so — but why then raise the question of possible legal problems
on the use
> It is symbols that come in from sources like the latter that
> come pre-encumbered with expectations and limitations that
> make the UTC (and WG2 for that matter) leery of them and
> desirous of demonstration of widespread general usage before
> encoding them as characters.
Somehow, most arguments put here forward against the encoding of these
symbols strike me as biased and shallow, especially when coming from
people I've seen, in some five years on this list, engaged in much
well argumented dicussions. Eitherway, if the open source movement
catches on, these symbols we be dully added to the UCS, apparently
later rather than sooner.
If the open source movement does not catch on, OTOH, I'm sure that
someone will quickly unearth these quaint symbols for a projected but
unfulfilled use and propose them for encoding, like so many weird
letters proposed in spelling reforms of the late 19th century…
-- António Martins-Tuválkin <antonio(a)tuvalkin.web.pt>
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