

A project to make expensive, legally-mandated standards documents public - Kliment
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret.html

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Anechoic
The article makes reference to the need for Standards organizations to charge
for standards so continue fundind the development of those standards. I've
contributed/am contributing to three ANSI standards and we're not compensated
for that work. In fact we have to spend money out of our own (or our firms')
pockets to work on these - I'm spending $1,000 to travel to Washington DC next
week for a meeting of one of these standards groups.

When complete, these standards will probably sell for $80-$100 a pop and I'll
see none of that. ANSI as an organization will contribute by providing some
editing and review (although the bulk of that work will be done by unpaid peer
reviewers) and it's necessary for them to charge a nominal fee to support
their work, but having seen this process from the inside, I don't see where
this money is going.

We need standards, but the gatekeeper aspect is a sham. When contributors
start getting paid for our efforts, maybe I'll change my mind.

~~~
Kliment
That sounds EXACTLY like the scientific publishing industry. What is the
motivation for you to do free work for these parasites?

~~~
dagw
_What is the motivation for you to do free work for these parasites?_

In most cases, both in scientific publishing and in writing standards, people
aren't doing free work, they're getting paid by their employers. So the next
question is what is the motivation of these employer to pay for you to work
for these parasites. In most cases the answer is a mixture of prestige,
advertising, influence and early access.

~~~
jedbrown
The typical situation in science is that you're expected to cover "100%" of
your time through some combination of grants and teaching. There is no
specific allocation for "professional service", but you're expected to do it
anyway.

With standards bodies, it's common that some representative of each
organization is required to attend meetings to retain voting privileges. So if
the organization wants a chance to influence the Standard, they need to send
people and pay for it. One reason is prestige/advertising, but a Standard also
enables tactical advantages, e.g., (a) include feature X that lets us showcase
our hardware or (b) prevent feature Y that would be expensive for us to
implement.

------
csense
> Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin
> posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a
> unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of
> Federal Regulations

This deadline has come and gone, and apparently they've gone ahead and
published a number of standards:

<https://law.resource.org/pub/12tables.html>

The background -- particularly Supreme Court cases -- given by public.resource
in the article and the above link make the situation pretty clear: If it's a
law, it's in the public domain, and it's legal to publish these standards.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

The legal question I have in mind is the following: The government adopts as
law technical documents developed and copyrighted by a (nominally) private
body, and thereby places them in the public domain. The authoring organization
expected to generate revenue by selling them and now that is much harder,
since they are in the public domain. It looks an awful lot like the government
is using _eminent domain_ : Government appropriation of private property (a
copyrighted work) for public purposes (writing laws). Under the eminent domain
clause of the Constitution (assuming all parties are US-based), shouldn't the
government pay the organization for using its legislative powers to take their
copyrighted work and place it in the public domain?

If the organization is entitled to eminent domain compensation, how do you
fairly determine the value of the documents? Clearly you can't use the number
of downloads from public.resource times the price the standards body would
have charged. This falls victim to Hollywood's classic piracy fallacy:
Assuming that anyone who downloads things for free would have bought them at
full price if the download hadn't been available. (This assumption obviously
defies all economic theory and common sense.) In this situation there's
another effect, possibly even stronger: Relatively few people would have cared
enough about these documents to spend thousands of dollars on them if they
hadn't been made into law.

Would the standards body still be entitled to eminent domain compensation if
they wrote the documents under the expectation that they would become law, or
actively lobbied the government to make them into law?

~~~
rprasad
THe government is not using eminent domain, as it is not appopriating any
private _tangible_ property. Moreover, it is a simple matter to evade
copyright by simply changing the language in whatever laws are adopted.
Finally, if any organization were to attempt to demand compensation for its
"standards" it would quickly find itself ignored and its standard would be
worth less than the electricity used to render them.

In other words, the standards body would not be entitled to any compensation,
nor should it expect any compensation if it has any hope of its "standards"
becoming law.

------
michael_miller
I agree with the article 100% - laws need to be freely accessible to everyone.
One particular standard which I hope they publish in the future is the HIPAA
standard(<http://store.x12.org/store/healthcare-5010-original-guides>). It's
pretty outrageous that to implement any form of electronic interfacing with
Medicare, a government insurer, you have to pay $2500. And it's not just a one
time cost - you have to keep buying them every couple of years to keep track
of new additions / errata.

~~~
buss
Absolutely. It's unbelievable that the WPC gets a monopoly on the healthcare
data interchange standard.

------
willyt
This is a big problem in Europe as well. In the UK increasingly the building
regulations refer you to British and EU standards which are very expensive.
Want to know the EU standard methods for designing drains for buildings? Be
prepared to pay £720(US$1160) [0]

[0]
[http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/SearchResults/?q=gravity%20drain...](http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/SearchResults/?q=gravity%20drainage%20inside%20buildings)

~~~
aes256
At the same time, I assume a standard like that only applies to people
designing drainage systems for sale within the EU.

Presumably if you are a corporation looking to design and sell drainage
systems, £720 to gain access to the relevant standards is a relatively small
cost in the grand scheme of things.

~~~
willyt
Nope, these apply to the design of any building with a sink or a toilet in it.
That's just the standards for the drainage pipe sizing, layout and design of
pipe bedding and cover. To be fair, for a very simple building you can
probably get enough information from a manufacturers website to get by, but
then you don't know how much of what they are telling you is sales patter
designed to make their product seem like the only solution to the problem. For
example, there are more than 320 standards referenced in the domestic version
of the Scottish Building Standards and while you don't need access to all of
them there are plenty that are very useful to have access to.

------
greggman
There's certainly other models. Not sure if they are better or worse. There's
the W3C model. I don't even know what that is honestly as although they help
propose standards much of what they do is document what browser vendors have
implemented after the fact and then try to get the browser vendors to agree. I
don't know what their funding model is

<http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees>

Their specs are public though

The Khronos Group (OpenGL, OpenCL, etc) is a pay to participate organization
but they make their specs public.

My point is only that even if ANSI, which others have brought up, needs money
their model of charging for the specs isn't the only way to do it.

As for the original article it certainly does seem outrageous that there are
laws that require you to follow some standard and you have to pay to access
that standard.

------
driverdan
This article is from last March. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate
to post a follow up article?

------
xxpor
There was a court case about building codes, where the court ruled that you
can't charge for the standard because it was the law. Let me see if I can find
it...

Edit: I can't find it. If someone more versed on finding court cases can find
it that would be awesome. IIRC, it involved a company suing a city(?) for
publishing a copywrited building code they had written but the court ruled
that you can't charge for the law.

~~~
gsmaverick
I believe you are referring to the case cited in the first section of this
article: Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Circuit,
2002).
([https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/293/293.F3d.791.9)...](https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/293/293.F3d.791.9\)9-40632.html)

~~~
xxpor
That's what I get for only reading the first few lines....

------
ChuckMcM
Its a worthy crusade and one which has such sweet irony. Standards
organizations who spend thousands to get their standard incorporated into the
law so that they can sell millions of dollars worth of documents to
municipalities and other organizations that have to comply.

Only to have all of their efforts become the biggest information give away in
decades! Priceless.

