- You need to purchase multiple standards (at least 4).
- In theory, you need to purchase a multi-user license if more than one person should be allowed to read the pdf in your company (hint: nobody purchases the multi-user license).
- Every few years, new versions of the standards are released which you have to purchase.
- Sometimes, you just purchase standards to realise that they're not applicable to your company.
- The industry is riddled with shadiness: A German standards web shop offers a "standards flatrate" for a "great price" of e.g. 750 EUR for 10 standards. [1]
- Getting off-topic, but more related shadiness: Your purchased PDFs are watermarked with your company name and full name of purchaser (!) in the footer of each page to prevent sharing.
[1] https://www.beuth.de/de/regelwerke/normen-flatrates-im-ueber...
And in case of standards in computing, like ISO 8601 - a lot of them are of interest to open source developers. If they could access them for free, they could make their code compliant. Software companies use a lot of open source, and often whether or not a product follows some standard somewhere is entirely dependent on whether the OSS component it uses follows the standard.
How does the law treat this differently from a book? You can buy a book and then give or sell it to whomever you wish without any restrictions... how is this different?
Then there's also another side to digital distribution, especially in entertainment — if you bought a (heavily DRM'ed) video game, or a movie, or a book, or something else, online, it's tied to your account. You can't lend whatever it is you bought to a friend like you absolutely could the same exact thing on a physical medium. You can't resell it either. You also rely on the mercy of the seller to not pull your access to the thing. Yet, even though it lacks this basic trait of a physical medium, sellers treat digital and physical as mostly the same thing.
And those prices look reasonable compared to drug database license costs.
And the real killer is meaningful use certification.
The whole field seems engineered to prevent competition.
So while ISO costs are unjustifiable, they’re a pittance compared to other compliance costs that most in the field will encounter.
Source: work for a medical billing company, have had to deal with this garbage before.
It is. After all it is not in the interests of anyone who is established in the field to make competition easy.
I was once tangentially involved with an app that was basically a weight tracker. It was supposed to be a simple, reliable solutions for doctors to prescribe their patients, that allowed doctors to export data, and did not have annoying ads.
Since doctors were supposed to prescribe the app, it had to be certified as a medical device. It was fortunately a self-certification process.
But still the certification process was 10x more expensive than just the app development.
The problem is that not every medical "startup" has multiple full time employees and millions in funding. Some are just a single doctor with a simple idea, and for them a few thousand dollar here and a few thousand dollar there quickly add up. The standards aren't their only expense.
Copyright might restrict reposting parts, but nothing (except perhaps license agreements) restricts public discussion.
You can see this by the fact that Wikipedia has complete details of the ISO date standard (as referenced in the parent tweet Tim replied to).
And nobody's doing that.
Most people aren't going to quote much anyway, which means the people who don't know what's referenced can't understand it because they have no context. Which brings us back to square one, you can't meaningfully discuss the content in public.
You absolutely can, trivially as the huge number of discussions or the ISO date format on StackOverflow show: https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=ISO+Date
There are lots of issues with locked down standards. But copyright means they can't be publicly discussed is factually incorrect.
(Also fair use means it's fine to quote enough context for a meaningful discussion anyway)
You can discuss the general requirements, and paragraph numbers, etc, but there's a limit to how much somebody who has the document can quote without legal problems. Somebody else who sees the discussion can not know if the discussions contain complete enough information to "reverse engineer" the standard well enough to meet its requirements.
All those discussions about the ISO date standard involves getting information from somebody who has access to the document and who then shared the information in public. Not all documents has that degree of public commentary.
And if you need to ask about sections which haven't been previously described in sufficient detail for your needs, then you're personally relying on individual people who have access to read it and rewrite the information for you. Which is a lot of work and also legally uncertain.
Fair use standards are not all that consistent. And that's a legal defense you can use in court after already having been sued, not before. Enough for context can vary between one sentence or three pages.
Fair Use exception in the US, and I think that would be covered by Fair Dealing in the UK and similar countries.
That's where expensive consultants who already have interpreted the standards are paid to explain to you. It's a bit of a "cartel" imho.
For instance, the C++ specification is registered as an ISO standard, which means you have to either rely on free drafts, or pay for it...
But getting funding through finances for 'a few hundred EUR' in a largish company could be nearly impossible. It's not a thing that can go into your yearly budget and it's not attached to any project. You'll have to pay out of your own pocket for that.
These codes are often produced by a single organization, "International Code Council", a non-profit somewhat analagous to ISO, which I believe sells them to governmental jurisidictions which adopt them as law, sometimes with some customizations or "choose A or B" choices.
One of the parties to the lawsuits involved happens to be a Y Combinator funded company, "UpCodes".
https://archinect.com/news/article/150195411/supreme-court-r...
https://www.constructiondive.com/news/construction-code-purv...
https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/a-court-decision-in-favor-...
In the US, if there are any cases where an ISO code is mentioned in law as legally binding in some way, it's possible someone could try to challenge the ability to keep from sharing the relevant standard text freely. It's not exactly the same situation, but this supreme court decision provides a possible path anyway.
Same problem in Australia with the AS/NZS standards. I've been having problems with my whiteset plaster, which is like a liquid applied white plaster surface used on almost every home here in Western Australia. Mine was done incorrectly, I had to purchase two different $250 standards to understand how it was done wrong, how it should behave, how it was tested, in order to file a complaint. It may not surprise you part of the reason it was applied incorrectly is because not every trade has a copy of said standard.
And then even once you purchase it, it's a "one user" watermarked PDF you're supposed to only have 1 copy of and there's lots of harsh warnings about that, so even those that have it and scared to run around with it.
It's a crazy situation. Because this is legislated stuff for building. As a consumer it's very expensive to inform yourself on these things. If you wanted to inform yourself on all aspects of a build it would get expensive fast.
It's also difficult for me to publish and discuss this information in the public domain to help other consumers having the same problem, as the limits of how much text I can "copy" appears technically set at 0 even though it's standard to "reference" it. But it's very easy to mis-interpret the standard if you don't read things in context.
If the standards are effectively government legislated they either need to be government funded (this makes total sense to me) or the price needs to be much more token, 10 dollars, with much less draconian access. But at that price the government may as well fund it anyway.
Somewhat off-topic, but I've never quite understood the American tendency to call something the "International X" when the US is only the country of any significance involved in it.
(It may be technically true that a handful of small countries have adopted the US building code – such as Bermuda or Western Samoa. But that doesn't change its status as an essentially American code. The US is the only major economy to use it, and non-US entities have very minimal, if any, input on its contents. And a few small countries might have adopted the US building code even if it was called "US" rather than "International".)
If anything the American tendency is to restrict interest to the US.
I don't know what the actual point of having the AIBS as a chapter of the ICC is. Probably an excuse for some overseas business trips.
At least in the US it’s fairly common for lobbies to offer prewritten codes in the hopes that the adopted codes are (at least pretty close) to the ones they want.
You could argue whether such a practices are how private industry and governmental regulations should interact, but it doesn’t seem like the term “international” is particularly problematic in the name. The “World Series” (of baseball) on the other hand...
Who are you saying is lobbying who here? Are you saying AIBS is lobbying the ICC? Or that the ICC is lobbying the AIBS?
I don't see why the AIBS would engage in lobbying about the contents of US building codes. What difference does it make to building surveyors in Australia what building codes in the US say?
AIBS appears to be a member of the ICC. The ICC appears to be an international lobby. In that context, AIBS (probably) lobbies the ABCB with some help from the ICC as do other chapter members their own respective government representatives or regulatory bodies. Or maybe they just enjoy the ICC newsletter emails. I was only pointing out that international here is not an really a presumptuous “the US is the world” misnomer.
Realistically it’s more probable that the group started out with a goal of world-wide adoption of the standards they produced and failed to get traction outside the USA sphere of influence.
"the principles that guide the Court’s analysis seem relatively clear. The law is in the public domain, and the public must be afforded free access to it. SeePRO, 140 S.Ct. at1507. That a law references a privately-authored, copyrighted work does not necessarily make that work “the law,” such that the public needs free access to the work. CCC, 44 F.3d at 74. However, a privately-authored work may “become the law” upon substantial government adoption in limited circumstances, based on considerations including (1) whether the private author intended or encouraged the work’s adoption into law; (2) whether the work comprehensively governs public conduct, such that it resembles a “law of general applicability”; (3) whether the work expressly regulates a broad area of private endeavor;(4) whether the work provides penalties or sanctions for violation of its contents; and (5) whether the alleged infringer has published and identified the work as part of the law, rather than the copyrighted material underlying the law."
The Supreme Court ruled in Georgia vs public.resource.org, which was very much not about building codes. P.R.Org actually does have another ongoing lawsuit that is similar to UpCode's: American Society for Testing and Materials et al. v. Public.Resource.Org
The UpCode ruling was at the district court level, and merely cited the ruling from Georgia vs public.resource.org.
Until we get at least appellate level decisions on the copyrightability of enacted codes, I'm unlikely to feel satisfied.
"Supreme Court rules that building codes cannot be copyrighted"
"Construction code purveyor calls Supreme Court's ruling that annotated code can't be copyrighted 'monumental'"
Are you saying those headlines were overstating?
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-1150_7m58.pdf
No, it didn't. It ruled that the State of Georgia couldn't claim copyright on officially-annotated legal codes. Your sources note this and speculate about how it might impact a different ongoing dispute about privately-copyrighted building codes owned by the ICC that are often referenced in, and thereby given force of, law (and the TC one of discusses it having an effect on a non-terminal ruling in the case (a motion to dismiss which was denied, allowing the case to move forward but not resolving it.)
No, it really isn't if they are serious, or even if they plan on being serious in the future.
If you are shipping anything classified as a device, regulatory & QA work will typically involve multiple full time hires and/or equivalent consulting help by the time you file. Things are a bit leaner in SAAS only world, but still significant.