That’s mutually exclusive with the plan. It means that SDOs can’t receive copyright protection in all instances, including when used by the government. That’s key to prevent internet fragmentation.

Pamela Samuelson, “Questioning Copyright in Standards,” University of California, Berkeley, https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/BC%20questioning%20standards.pdf

Standards are essential to the operation of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and indeed, the modern information society, an integral part of the largely invisible infrastructure of the modern world that makes things work.1 Every time people send email, for example, more than two hundred formally adopted Internet standards are implicated.2 With the rise of the information economy, copyright has become a new prominent factor in the longstanding debate over intellectual property rights in standards,3 as standard-setting organizations (SSOs) increasingly claim and charge substantial fees for access to and rights to use standards such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) country, currency, and language codes and medical and dental procedure codes promulgated by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Dental Association (AMA).4

The high importance of claims of copyright in standards is illustrated by a “clarification” of its intellectual property policy that ISO published in July 2003. It would have required all software developers and commercial resellers of data who embedded data elements from ISO’s standard country, language, and currency codes to pay an annual fee (or a one-time fee plus regular maintenance fees) for doing so. 5 Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a letter to ISO’s President to object to this policy because of its negative impact on the evolution of the Web:

These and similar codes are widely used on the Web. In particular the language and country codes are of direct interest to W3C and the users of W3C Recommendations in the context of HTTP, HTML and XML and various other technologies. Language and country codes currently provide a single, standard way of identifying languages (and locales) throughout the Web. Multilingual Web sites and Web pages, as well as internationalization and localization features, would be particularly affected.

Any charges for the use of these standards are going to lead to fragmentation, delay in deployment, and in effect a lack of standardization. In particular, those users who depend upon multi-lingual or non-English language services will suffer.

Given that this policy would have profound impact not only on ISO, but also on industry and users of the Web at large, we urge ISO to further consider this policy and its broader implications and consequences, and to reassure the community as quickly as possible that there will be no charges for the use of these standards.