According to US Federal Court filings, all IAQG-produced aerospace standards, including the upcoming update to AS9100, are on indefinite hold and “unpublishable” due to a copyright battle with the prior publisher, SAE.
IAQG and SAE have launched a multi-pronged legal attack against each other, prompted by the IAQG’s unilateral decision to take over aerospace auditor credentialing. That sidelined SAE’s partner company, Probitas Authentication, which SAE sued the IAQG over. The court dismissed the case for lack of jurisdiction.
In a countersuit, IAQG now claims SAE did not renew its license for ANSI/ISO materials, such as the ISO 9001 text that appears in AS9100 and other standards. An Agreement between the parties would have required SAE to transfer the license to IAQG, but SAE instead let the license agreement with ANSI/ISO lapse.
As a result, IAQG now claims that none of the standards can be published, since they rely on ISO text to which neither party has legal rights. In its Amended Complaint in IAQG v SAE, the group wrote:
[An SAE] December 1 Letter was, in substance, an admission that SAE could no longer manage the ANSI/ ISO relationship on its own and could not secure the necessary license to allow SAE to publish Standards containing ISO content
In a counterfiling, SAE claimed this meant the standards were “unpublishable.”
The immediate effects are preventing the publication of four administrative standards that provide rules for the AS9100 auditing scheme: IA9101, IA9104/1, IA9104/2, and IA9104/3. However, IAQG lists a total of twenty-one standards that are, or will be, affected, including the new “IA9100” reboot of AS9100.
The IAQG asks the court for relief in the form of granting it the sole right to obtain the copyright license for ISO content, thus further alienating SAE from the scheme.
Despite alleging to be a not-for-profit organization, the IAQG bemoans a loss of revenue expected from the revisions, citing “lost royalty streams… lost publication value; … lost royalty and publication value.” Oxebridge has argued that the fight between the parties is largely over who can make a bigger profit from the scheme, despite all the parties having filed themselves as tax-exempt non-profits.
IAQG has repeatedly refused to enforce the AS9101 standards, suggesting that revising them into the new “IA” is an attempt to generate revenue by rebranding what are essentially dead rulesets. Even though the rules are not upheld, IAQG requires auditors and certification bodies to pay for training on them.
To date, the IAQG still has not taken on a formal complaint alleging violations of the AS9101 family by the certification body KSQA, which was found to have falsified AS9100 audits for multiple clients over multiple years.
As a result, until the matter is settled in court, it appears that neither IAQG nor SAE will release any new aerospace standards.
