Patent
The general BOCU algorithm is covered by United States Patent #6,737,994, which also mentions the specific BOCU-1 implementation. IBM, which employed both of the inventors of BOCU-1 at the time it was created, states in the Unicode Technical Note that implementers of a "fully compliant version of BOCU-1" must contact IBM to request a royalty-free license. BOCU-1 is the only Unicode compression scheme described on the Unicode Web site that is known to be encumbered with intellectual property restrictions.
By contrast, IBM also filed for a patent on UTF-EBCDIC, but it chose in that case to make the documentation and encoding scheme “freely available to anyone concerned towards making the transformation format as part of the UCS standards,” instead of requiring implementers to request a license.
Read more about this topic: Binary Ordered Compression For Unicode
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