Can the Law Be Copyrighted?
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The ICC v. UpCodes lawsuit is clearly one important front in this battle. Another potential route to ending this would be for a licensed contractor to sue the government for failing to make freely available the building codes under which he/she is legally bound. The legal argument (and thus the government's legal duty) would be crystal clear in a case like that, especially because both civil and criminal law requires such adherence.
In particular for people who are able to understand German, I recommend reading "Franz Kafka - Vor dem Gesetz" (Türhüterparabel - gatekeeper parable):
> https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/erzahlungen-i-9763/16
English translation:
> http://www.kafka-online.info/before-the-law.html
Here a narrated version (German):
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77JLmS6diaE
This parable is also part of the novel fragment "Der Proceß" (The Trial) by Franz Kafka - a novel that I can also highly recommend:
> https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/der-prozess-9771/1
English translation:
On the ICC v. UpCodes battle, UpCodes just ripped the content from ICC and used it to create their own app. The ethical gray zone I see is this: if ICC can't fund the process of writing the codes, how will they get written? Can a for-profit company like UpCodes be trusted to take up the reigns on that if ICC can no longer justify creating the codes?
Building considerations are waaaaaay more involved and complicated than you can even begin to imagine.
For example, Massachusetts changed the stair riser height from 7-3/4" to 8-1/4" (https://up.codes/viewer/massachusetts/irc-2015/chapter/3/bui...).
Why do 49 states (I think) have one height and MA has a different one?
Not saying all the differences don't make sense just a fair amount of them. I'm also not an industry professional (despite staring at these codes all day, I'm usually not actually reading them), so honestly asking here.
Have you considered that perhaps the engineers who contributed that change to the MA residential code have done their homework, identified value worth pursuing (whether for safety, building optimization, new material availability, future planning, etc.), and decided it was worth going through what surely isn't a painless ECP process to amend what you've dismissed to be trivial minutae?
All that really matters is 7-11: the magic ratio for building your own stairs. Perhaps not the most ideal, but the easiest to remember and also trivial to build from common dimensional lumber[1] :)
On a more serious note, what _truly_ matters is consistency of the steps. Interstep deviations are what cause most injuries. After the first or second step, w'ever the rise/run, the brain has already adapted.
[1] 2x6" boards are actually 1.5x5.5". 5.5+1.5==7 and 5.5*2==11. 7-11 is the traditional American rise/run ratio. I think it's mostly coincidental, though, that 2x6 dimensional lumber adds up the way it does.
Structural codes are fine by me, the newer energy codes are great too, our new house is so much cheaper to heat/cool than the 70s house we previously owned.
My understanding is that buildings in developing countries are more prone to disaster because of the way they're financed. In developed countries, buildings are funded by banks, which require insurance, which require inspections.
You clearly haven't seen the kind of half-baked crap that comes out of unregulated construction. Even in places with established building code, certain outcomes aren't always guaranteed, e.g. the dumpster fires known as LA and SF.
"the biggest potential saving of lives in rural areas lies in compliance with better building standards, so that homes and schools do not collapse so easily"
(https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2106507...)
The code bodies are really out of control at this point. They are unelected and unaccountable to anyone. Meanwhile, the codes they come up with get incorporated by local political hacks.
Detached residential buildings in our area now require fire sprinkler systems to be installed. This is way over the top, adding considerable cost and risk. Talked to a local fire department volunteer who said a large number of their calls are to go to peoples homes and turn off the sprinklers that were activated by false alarm (you're not allowed to). The owners suffer extensive flood damage for nothing, and often don't realize their homeowners insurance doesn't have a flood rider to cover the damage. So, this one change wastes emergency personnel time and destroys property. Good job! Meanwhile, the people who wrote the code are not impacted in any way by this.
It gets better. People not on municipal water (very large percentage) have no hope of feeding such a sprinkler system, so are required to install a water tank in their attic. This complicates remodeling to such an extent - its yet another reason people are getting uninspected work done.
In addition, the laws are written by volunteers. ICC convenes committees of volunteers who author the law. That's how the run such huge profit margins.
EDIT: Disclaimer - As stated in a couple other spots on this page, I am a cofounder of UpCodes.
Stop talking out of your ass.
If government wants to institute regulations it can pay for them.
I still think taxes would be superior for funding, but I see the need for the current methodology. The alternative would be comparisons to the GPG maintainer barely able to afford their bills. The ICC seems to be the regulatory code version of Let's Encrypt (backed by copyright law).
BTW, it's not only government officials and industry people who have to read these laws, it's also all homeowners doing any kind of renovation or DIY project.
I have NEVER heard of anyone complaining about being taxed a few pennies a year to fund government regulations that save lives or whatever.
However, if the government acted as expected, incorporating a copyrighted work into law would necessarily place the work into the public domain, as are all other laws that were directly written into the legal code, thus removing the copyright from the owner. This, I suspect, would indeed result in a lawsuit against the government for attempting to reallocate copyright without due process (or some such legal complaint.)
When an engineering firm spends considerable revenue designing specifications that should become regulations, how should we compensate them and still maintain free access? I don't have any good answers myself.
Yes, it's a self referential ponzi scheme forcing citizens to pay to be adherent to laws. It should be free.
INAL however, I think the main loophole that allows it to exist is that since it's a private company (albeit labelled as a non-profit) it has 'copyright' on its publications, which is like the 'mechanical copyright' that the music /video industry has on CDs add DVDs, which is independent to the 'artistic copyright'. Many of our 'governing bodies' operate that this way: there's the law as written, and then there's the implementation of said law (tax office, Medicare, workers compensation, etc) in which, over time, become the arbitrator of the law -- which is a very different thing.
Regardless, he fought his case up to the county court and won, based on the argument that it was not sensible to expect the public to adhere to an AS that was not publicly available.
https://www.mauriceblackburn.com.au/about/media-centre/media...
- St Thomas Aquinas [1]
The key word I want to bring attention from that quote is promulgated, or made known.
If law can be copyrighted by a private entity, by definition it cannot be universally promulgated and should not be considered a valid law. Otherwise, we will end up with private, unknown, laws that will be pulled out of nowhere when convenient.
The text of law must be universally accessible to all (at least within a jurisdiction) or the law should be deemed invalid.
"Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.
...
That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness. ... let the oppressed, who has a case at law, come and stand before this my image as king of righteousness; let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words: the inscription will explain his case to him."
It takes power away from homeowners when you can’t question the work of a tradesman because you can’t get your own copy of the standards.
It also makes it hard for owner-builders like me who are required to follow the standards but don’t really want to pay for them.
Jim Warren is the reason all of the California code was opened up and put online in the 1990s.
Carl Malamud has been working on this for decades, and among other things is the reason SEC filings are all online. He's been working hard on building codes for many years too. His nonprofit is Public.Resource.Org
Another nonprofit, free.law, has several programs to free up other legal resources needed to understand the law.
We're pretty new on the scene and unlike Carl who's an activist and whose main purpose is to protect the rule of law, we kind of stumbled into this lawsuit. We thought we were in the clear! Especially reading the case law, including the Veeck case (fought and lost by SBCCI which later became ICC) and seeing that Carl has most of the ICC materials on his site. We thought at the very least ICC wouldn't be able to relitigate this issue. It's bullshit.
Anyway, UpCodes wouldn't exist if it weren't for Carl Malamud, Corynne McSherry and Peter Veeck.
It seems wrong that local and state governments can both (a) release themselves of their own governing decisions by choosing a sole-sourced third party to write the regulations and (b) allow that third party to control access to the regulations at the same time. However, having myself visited an area in an underdeveloped country which was basically a shantytown, we should all recognize that building codes improve the lives of everyone.
The only real outcome that fits my IANAL vision of the law is to break up this monopoly and for local governments adopt and subsequently outline the codes themselves. The business could maybe then become selling those codes as a vendor to the government, but the governments themselves are the ones publishing them to their citizens.
Oh your building code is copyrighted and you have to pay to get a copy? Good news! Legally there is no building code.
If a court require files be submitted in .docx mean that MS loses copyright on .docx file structure?
What's interesting is metadata: though court decisions themselves are not copyrightable, pagination and such (which is used by the courts to refer to other decisions) is. Disturbingly, when Malamud tried to publish Georgia's state laws he was accused of terrorism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
However, the very scenario is covered generally by statute already. Regulations, even copyrighted ones adopted by an agency, must be publicly accessible to have the force of law. Freely accessible in most cases relate to having physical access to the text in some free way. This seems like something that can be solved very simply on the state level: just redefine publicly accessible to publicly accessible on the internet.
What the NFPA[1] does with its codes is to make them "available" through this horrible Java reader applet that prevents you from printing, selecting, copying and pasting or doing anything except looking at one page at a time. Oh, and half the time it's broken, or you have an incompatible version of Java or some other nonsense. It's a mess.
[1] National Fire Protection Association. They publish the National Electric Code (NEC) among others.
Of course this would change the business model, but it's not like there isn't a way to monetize the work in such a system.
Even without for profit firms?
Other companies, like FastCase, have been there, too.
That's how they have such massive profit margins and can afford to pay their CEO $742,000, when the median non-profit CEO gets $104,000 (see our references here: up.codes/free-law).
The entirety of ICC's building code as it applies to my state is both freely accessible by the general public on their website, and unlike other complete douchebag SDOs--looking at you, NFPA--it's actually usable. Anecdotally, I leveraged the crap out of the residential building code while contracting extensive rennovations to my home last year.
With so much liability behind them, building codes will always be relatively complex.
If "codes" can be held in secret by corporations until you pay them, could any law be a such? Could the rules of the road be shifted from the law books to secret laws too?
Secret laws trouble me greatly. They go fundamentally against the rule of law.
BULLSHIT!
The various no-fly and watch lists are like that too -- consider Rahinah Ibrahim who was accidentally placed on the no fly list in a Brazil-like incident. The government tried to bar her from fighting it or even explaining what happened.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Suprem...
[2] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Man-who...
What I described was the court ruling; its appeal was denied by the US Supreme Court.
Most of the order is dismissal of the other claims on jurisdictional grounds and the appellate court (which by statute is primary, not appellate in this case) declined to take the case. As it is primary, this seems strange to me.
I was in the courtroom when the case was argued and it was clear the judge was looking for a good reason to throw it out rather than issue a ruling.
The only sensible model is that in order for a state (or other AHJ) to incorporate a code into law, then it must license it for the purpose of doing so. States would then directly pay code bodies for writing the codes, and could weigh for themselves whether it really makes sense to pay for revisions every 3 years.
Of course the code bodies don't actually want to just do this. What they want to do is the classic rent seeking model of installing their hook into government "for free", and then extracting a toll on each individual user in the form of official code books, prep manuals, etc. But this is directly incompatible with the rule of law, as the case law has been casually demonstrating.
(PS if you want an example of how much sway trade guilds still hold over local governments, check out Ernst Meyer vs Town of Nantucket. It's not about code per se, but about the general right to work on one's own home)
It's maddening that the government can simply wholesale adopt a code and not make it public. The feds, or at least the states individually, should hire experts to write the codes that are used by the public. Anything else is a travesty.
I think the grandparent is right, the only viable business model is for states to pay a license to incorporate the codes into the law. We'd need to rewrite copyright law somewhat for that to work, because the code-writing agency needs to retain the ability to sell a license to more than one state, and sell a license for updates to the code, and to stop other people from making derivative works and trying to sell those to the states.
A) Buy out specifications to release to public domain as part of the law.
B) Pay government workers / contract outside entities to perform work under the same restrictions as government workers: the results of work becoming public domain.
That includes the organization in this article, ICC. The majority of ICC’s revenue comes from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law. ICC makes a lot of money. Attempting to copyright the law is unnecessary.
That's not actually true: HIPAA regulations are adopted by the federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services within the Department of Health and Human Services under statutory authority in HIPAA.
However, there are a large number of private IT and other standards that are directly mandated for certain uses under those regulations (and, in many cases, those standards themselves incorporate other private standards.) Some of these standards are free-of-charge, others are not.
You can be charged criminally for not following these laws that are behind paywalls.
In the ASTM v Public.Resource.Org case, I believe you are right, PRO agreed to voluntarily remove the laws while the case goes on. But that case has been going on since 2013 (https://ia801306.us.archive.org/33/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.16...). I suspect the law publishers are quite happy to have it drag on for another decade. The NFPA (publisher of NEC) makes over $80M a year, and the CEO is very well paid.
I obviously hope this doesn't happen, but it would be a logically consistent outcome. This would then "shatter" the argument into many impractical state-level lawsuits over judgment calls where an AHJ declared something unsafe because it didn't follow the letter of the code (even though it's not actually law), and non-code-buying individuals would each be left fighting uphill battles to prove their work was safe - effectively the shape of the Meyer reference I posted above.
https://www.nfpa.org/NEC/About-the-NEC/Free-online-access-to...
If one doesn't actually want to digest dense technical specifications, I'd recommend a practical book distilling the subject down to what's relevant. The local library likely has such books, along with a copy of the full NEC.
If you were simply trying to be helpful by pointing out a practical avenue of access, then the following rebuttal isn't directed at you. But from an abstract legal perspective, the whole point is that a private entity should never have the privilege of owning the law, and them being kind and gifting some limited form of access does not change this.
In other words, if you want to actually use them without being constantly annoyed, you'll have to pay up.
I am curious how far the open access decisions will reach. The building standards are incorporated into the law with amendments, so the state collaborates with the standards bodies to publish them. But these codes also reference many other standards published by ASTM, ASME, NSF, etc. by reference only (e.g. the pipe geometries, thread widths, manufacturing and testing methods). Do open access decisions cover these standards bodies’ publications too? I wish they did.
The idea of copyrighting a publication of legal statutes or codes could have some good, but the idea of obstructing the publics access to regulations, laws, or codes, and then somwhere down the line this problem goes away in exchange for money, is absolute despotic kruft.
so finacially challenged people have impaired opportunity to understand the law, its already an issue when there are mainly online disseminations of statues, and no physical text in easy reach. The technically challenged people have no access to the text of law in digital form, furthermore there is an issue with privacy that could come about. No-one should have to Pay, login, sign up or give PII in exchange for access to text of legal statutes, something that is public property and derived from public monies remitted to an elected government acting within its bounds of authority.
No it cannot. Copyright grants things called "exclusive rights". They are called such because, absent copyright, nobody is excluded from them. There is no good whatsoever in hindering people from copying, distributing, publicly performing, or creating derived works from existing laws or regulations.
I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish by saying "Copyright doesnt always mean no-one else has rights to it." It's like saying shooting someone's leg doesn't mean you shot their arm. Copyright's sole purpose is to exclude rights from people who would otherwise have them. Pointing out that it doesn't take away all rights doesn't add to the discussion.
This isn't true. Let's say we decide that our copyright registry requires the submission of a full work to the government for archival purposes so we can compare a given work against the registered copyright. We'd obviously want someone to be able to check the register, but not gain the right to print someone else's registered work for sale commercially. If we didn't have any hindering, we couldn't actually run the registry at all!
The discussion here presupposes that all works which relate to regulations or laws do not have any independent value outside of their legal function, which isn't necessarily the case.
That said, when it comes to the text of legislation or a building code, your assumptions hold true. Just don't design a policy solution ignoring the other edge cases, though :).
So where's the utility in permitting the codes to be copyrighted? How could the public benefit from this?
Reminds me of "Brazil" (1985), the Ministry of Information Retrieval (euphemism for torture) and their capital efficiency:
> I understand this concern on behalf of the taxpayers. People want value for money. That's why we always insist on the principal of Information Retrieval charges. It's absolutely right and fair that those found guilty should pay for their periods of detention and the Information Retrieval procedures used in their interrogations.
> Don't fight it son, confess quickly. If you hold out too long, you could jeopardize your credit rating.
It's hard to get most people to care, but this really does affect everyone.
You can also follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/upcodes
As you can see, we're not very good at social media and have small reach, so any help is appreciated!
I'm a recovering programmer turned woodworker with a pretty small following (200 and some followers, like I said, I'm the last person who should be telling people how to use social media), but I follow some carpenters and I'm consistently impressed with how much genuinely informative discussion takes place.
""" Judge Tatel: you have to stay in the hospital for the three days. Can they not use three days?
Mr. Verrilli: No, I think they could describe the fact that the standard says three days. But again ...
Judge Tatel: More than two and less than four? Is that what they'd have to say? """
(p. 24 of DC Circuit oral argument, https://www.dropbox.com/s/bb0by3nm3dfql3v/gov.uscourts.cadc....)
But to answer more directly, we host the law. If we change the precise wording of the law, then that's unacceptable. If you being tried, you can't say "well, I followed this alternative law and if you read that, you'll see it can be interpreted differently". No, the exact text of the law is the law, nothing else.
If X isn't bound as part of the law, and it can't be re-stated while keeping the intent in tact, then imho it should be effectively invalid. Just my own opinion, not something the court system would uphold necessarily.
I do find this appalling in practice. I would have less issue so long as the copyright holders for any legal specifications were limited to non-profit organizations with open accounting provisions.
Can you talk about your plan to defend your position at all? I'm somewhat curious if the ICC has a demonstrated history of licensing their codes to US governments. When cities & states publish the codes in print and online, presumably the ICC would need to be licensing those codes in written agreements, if the ICC's position has merit. It seems like it might be a problem for their case if they can't show a history of having granted copyrights everywhere the codes have been published before.
Even though I think laws shouldn't be copyrightable, I have a small amount of sympathy for the ICC saying they did work that is now being used without any compensation. Hopefully they will update their expectations and figure out how to charge for some additional value beyond the text of the legal codes. But I'm also curious if you guys have started exploring any peaceful solutions such as revenue sharing, or paying the ICC for versions of codes, or support, or annotations, etc.?
I believe the ICC and state governments do reach agreements. For example, the Michigan state government's site instructs citizens to go buy the laws from ICC. Fun fact: the only play to read these Michigan laws for free online is UpCodes. We bought the physical books, sliced, scanned, OCRed, ingested and posted them.
In terms of our plan, we're relying a lot on case law. We put 4 very clear examples on our advocacy page. (up.codes/free-law, see "Didn't ICC already litigate this case?" under the FAQ)
> I have a small amount of sympathy for the ICC saying they did work that is now being used without any compensation.
Just don't forget that the codes are written by volunteers who never see a penny AFAIK. ICC organizers the volunteers (which is an important time-consuming task I do recognize).
Also, don't think they have no compensation. The majority of ICC’s revenue comes from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law. Their CEO makes $742,000 in salary, which is arguably a bit high for a non-profit.
edit: FTA: "UpCodes did not ask ICC to license the code"
Half the stories are about people failing to convince them to let them touch their laws and half are about people who just assumed they're in the clear and then get a letter with 12 top corporate litigators saying they'd be suing them personally in federal court.
I happen to be at a point in my life where I don't have much to lose and hence when I fell into the second bucket, was able to fight back. But yeah, they're trying to personally bankrupt us.
You guys are definitely doing something that is innovative and a win for everyone (except ICC). Best of luck on the lawsuit!
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/apr/19/oregon-clai...
but they decided "not to enforce any" after word got out:
https://lawblog.justia.com/2008/06/19/oregon-decides-not-to-...
https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...
https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-...
If the ICC wanted to keep their work papers private, they should not lobby to get the enacted as laws and code. No one is forcing them to lobby their rules to state houses & cities.
In the age of the Internet, where data storage and transmission costs are effectively $0 for basic text documents, there is absolutely no excuse for all laws and codes to be 100% public domain.
It's not as if the government has to print a physical book for every citizen.
And you're still sidestepping the issue of the codes having a cost of production like any intellectual work, in terms of deciding e.g. the optimal balance to put in terms of safety vs cost of a building code. It doesn't cost for each access, but they do have to amortize that cost, and it makes sense for the cost to be allocated toward those who do specialized work in that domain.
> Its codes
But they aren't the ICCs codes, they are laws. If they were non-legal industry standards a builder agreed to uphold as part of guild membership, then sure, they're ICCs property. But they're not.
Is a lawyer allowed to copy-paste or take screenshots "ICC laws" for use as evidence? One doesn't need private party permission to cite other sections of the law, and it's a damn slippery slope to start treating sections of the law differently.
>Its model codes and standards are developed by committees made up of volunteers from its membership and ICC staff. The ICC lobbies for the code to be enacted into law, and earns revenue by selling code books and running accreditation programs.
They are the ones that come up with rules to follow, then they lobby the government to make the rules into law, and then sell access to the rules/law. How is this not a racket?
Not only that - aren't they also a monopoly that is abusing their monopoly position?
The AG of Canada has taken the position that they're immune to copyright and can do whatever they want. By contrast, some amicus filings indicate they want these types of documentation to fall within the public domain.
It'll be interesting to see what solution is adopted, but I believe that there's a more intellectually-consistent, scaleable solution which is not in front of the courts that addresses the issues directly and with minimal fall-out to other stakeholders. Unfortunately, I only caught the ear of a few of the counsel after their filings were already done, so I don't think the proper solution will even be in front of the court.
That said, there's plenty of hope, and I'm glad the issue is in front of the courts. I do, however, find it strange that UpCodes settled while the founders were named directly but not included in the settlement.
In terms of the ASCE settlement, it included us, so the settlement was between ASCE, UpCodes, Inc., and both cofounders.
Some attempt to attenuate copyright's ability to exclude in the case of law-like works by using carve-outs in copyright, but this solution isn't scaleable - Fair dealing and Fair use are consistently under siege, attacked in international-level agreements and interpreted fairly inconsistently between jurisdictions.
Instead, my proposal is to treat law-like documents as being in the public domain but only to the extent that they are being used for their law-like purpose.
Accordingly, even if we change the nature of databased works in the future, we 1) assure the access of the public to codes, regulations, registration documents and other key elements of law, 2) ensure that the government's treating of these documents is not hampered by transmission or duplication restrictions arising out of copyright, and 3) protect stakeholder interests by restricting the scope of use to the areas where there is a public purpose to the dissemination of these works.
I can send the case names privately if you'd like.
I don't even know where your question comes from.
"Yeah, nice. So you wrote a book, blah blah blah. What are you doing for me now? Why should I pay you anything? The text of the book already exists? You're just deadweight now."
And you can't see why I would question such a situation?
That's no different from any other copyright situation, in terms of producing something of value and having to be paid for each copy, except that the government has propped up demand by making it the law and absorbing the royalty cost.
Contractors will buy a copy. And any novice that just wants to DIY can go look up the rules for free. And the copyright holder gets the sales from the library and city halls sales.
In common law countries, copyright developed in England, which has always had a concept of Crown copyright.[1]
Legislation has always been subject to Crown copyright. So the answer to the article's heading is "yes, as has always been the case".
However, the real problem is different: legislation often gives binding force to things not produced by the legislature. This includes texts of international treaties (in common law countries other than the US, legislation is needed to give them municipal effect), and sometimes even laws of other jurisdictions (eg many Australian legislative regimes are based on the laws of one State being "picked up" and applied as if they had been enacted by another State).[2]
The particular problem is when legal force is given to a document that is produced by private parties. That document isn't a "law" in the usual sense, but legal obligations (and rights) can be imposed/created by actual laws by reference to its contents. eg: you must build to a standard, which is defined as a document produced by standards body X, and suffer a penalty or have your building liable to be demolished if you don't.
The problem addressed in the article is when those non-laws are given legal effect by actual laws. It should be the case that a citizen can find the entire contents of laws that bind them. There are areas of discourse in jurisprudence about it being fundamentally unfair if there are "secret" laws that a person may contravene but cannot know about to avoid contravening. The present topic comes close - the person has to pay to know the full extent of the law that binds them.
This is a policy issue, not a copyright one. Private documents like this will be subject to copyright because they are literary works.[3] The question is how to avoid the moral unfairness in one having to pay to know what one is required to do. Many solutions exist, eg compulsory licensing, a payment by the government in exchange for a creative commons style licence, etc.
The counter argument is that it takes expertise, time and money to create and maintain these standards, and if standards don't cover things to do with everyday life (eg obligations for driving, laws about what you can and can't do on the street) but are restricted to things like building or industrial activities (eg earthing requirements for high voltage installations), then these aren't standards that can be contravened by chance, but only apply if you undertake project X. So if someone wants to do project X and needs to comply with a paid standard to do project X, then doing so is a cost of doing project X.
TFA discusses this issue: building codes are relevant if you want to undertake building work. Should there be an extra cost of doing so, noting that you will already incur application/permit costs, inspection costs, etc in addition to the materials and labour?
We have exactly this issue in Australia: things often have to be done according to Australian Standards (which now often also double as New Zealand standards), but these are supplied by a private company that produces and charges for them. eg if you want to buy the standard AS 1926.1-2012 - Swimming pool safety-Safety barriers for swimming pools, a hard copy is A$152.66 and a soft copy is A$137.39.
So the question is - if someone wants to put in a swimming pool, is it wrong that they have to pay and extra amount to get a copy of the standards that they must build to?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright 2. This is a dark art, and has all sorts of conceptual and practical problems, but it is done. 3. I leave aside the massive expansion in what is protected under copyright, another policy question but one that content creators have decisively won.
Building codes just provide precise definitions of what constitute safe construction. They aren't laws themselves.
The question here is should the cost of writing a technical piece that make up the law be placed on those who must follow it? Or should the cost be spread out to all tax payers?
(Courts should not be funded via court fines, and prisons should not be funded by inmate labor, for similar reasons.)
It costs several hundred dollars to get a standard. The profit margins are similar to Reed Elsevier.
> laws are clear, predictable and accessible > laws are publicly made and the community is able to participate in the law-making process
Then, in Australia, the answer is clear. Australia lacks the rule of law.
The laws are not accessible nor publicly made. They are privately made and difficult to access.
We started UpCodes for a couple reasons: one is to make money and build a business, another is because it seemed fun and interesting work, another is because we think this was important that no one was tackling (simplifying compliance, not the lawsuit which was unexpected and very unfortunate).
> their idea is that people will pay them instead of ICC
No, that's not right. Although, I admit I am pretty upset with them, they caused me a lot of personal anxiety of the last 19 months.
But ICC makes most of their revenue from program services, including consulting, certification, and training[1]. We haven't every thought about doing any of that, so their primary revenue stream is very much safe. The also have membership dues which are quite significant too.
[1] page 52 here: http://media.iccsafe.org/AnnualReports/2015/2015AnnualReport...
I didn't read through the whole report and I'll admit it's not entirely clear what all the line items are, but (1) the "program/member services" cost more than the revenue the "program services" generate, and if "product sales" does represent their sales of access to the standards it's well above a third of their revenue. IIUC, they're a nonprofit, so those sales, and the potential loss to a competitor are the difference between solvency and insolvency.
> another is because we think this was important that no one was tackling
Maybe I'm just tired of the "disruption" economy, which as I see it is (1) find a way to avoid paying for things that other businesses have been paying for, (2) claim you've found a better business model, (3) profit. c.f, Uber, Airbnb, Monkey Parking.
In the "old days" you would have partnered with ICC, and built a better product together. But that's not exciting enough. Instead, you're doing it "disruption style" and trying to see what you can get away with. But face it, if you're successful, you're ruining peoples livelihoods. AIUI, these code standards are not some lunchtime conversations put together by politicians, they are specific, detailed requirements done by professionals for professionals, and one of the defining characteristic of being a professional is that you expect to be paid for your work.
The question of whether the law can be copyrighted is a valid one. Legal publishing companies have been dealing with this question for a while now (the most common way of citing court cases comes from a private company). But people are also entitled to be paid for their work, and you can't upend the system until you solve that problem too.