We are in an interesting situation in that the US 5th Circuit ruled in 2002 (Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress Int'l, Inc., 293 F.3d 791 (5th Cir. 2002)) that "public ownership of the law means 'precisely' that 'the law' is in the 'public domain' for whatever use the citizens choose to make of it. Citizens may reproduce copies of the law for many purposes, not only to guide their actions but to influence future legislation, educate their neighborhood association, or simply to amuse.'"
That being the precedent, once a building code is accepted into law, the full text of construction building codes becomes public domain. The court ruled exactly that, an individual cannot be penalized for copy pasting building code to other platforms and offering free access to the text.
The problem is that code publishers have a financial interest to restrict access to the codes (the above court case was one such example). Therefore they create endpoints with restrictive access and encourage local governments to use their endpoints to access the codes in a neutered manner, for example, copy-paste disabled, and other superficial obstacles, with plenty of warnings, end-user agreements, etc.
However the above 5th circuit case is the state of the law. Yet I can't find any state governments offering the codes digitally. It's always a referral to one of these neutered sites.
It would be great to have a plain text version of the code, especially to put it in a git repo and diff the changes each time codes are updated by the local government.
The above should be perfectly legal, as the code, once adopted, becomes public domain. Any thoughts on this?
In the UK, the code is BS7671 from the IET with related publications about specialist installations, but the law which governs the application of them is the Electricity at Work Act, 1989.