Hacker News Reader

Comment by cabaalis | Hacker News Reader

(IANAL) Good luck in your case, as it appears there is a government-created monopoly at work. I do believe ICC should own and control the copyrights to their work, however.

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.

View on HN

You could fix this issue by a federal law that says any law or regulation that isn't freely available is unenforceable.

Oh your building code is copyrighted and you have to pay to get a copy? Good news! Legally there is no building code.

The federal government forcing a state to enforce a federal statute would definitely violate the 10th Amendment if the state has laws against that. I think most states have building codes irrespective of copyright status.

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.

You have to be very specific about "publicly accessible on the Internet". This has to mean in a searchable, interlinked, HTML format.

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.

Somehow it's not surprising to hear the NFPA Java reader is often broken. There's a perverse incentive: the more broken it is, the more money they make selling the law in book form. And then when they get to court, they can just say they already provide free access.

I'd go the other way and write it into law that the law is uncopywritable.

The law is already uncopyrightable. The issue is whether anything incorporated by reference by the law would retroactively remove its copyright.

If a court require files be submitted in .docx mean that MS loses copyright on .docx file structure?

The stuff incorporated by reference has the force of law so should be freely available and resdistributable.

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...

Opinion of mine, abuse of terrorism statutes should be a felony.

The government should be able to use its power of Eminent Domain to buy the copyright from ICC. To me it seems like the only fair solution.

And who will fix that price tag? Do you think ICC will sell their product even a penny short "for the greater benefit of the public"?

Well the previous poster was talking about eminent domain so in that case the government would set the price tag as it always does in eminent domain cases. However, eminent domain need not be used. The government could also purchase the copyright. Or the government could purchase a license that says something like "anyone subject to this law may copy/disseminate/etc. it" and simply make that a requirement of its procurement processes. Maybe the ICC doesn't want to play ball (and assuming no eminent domain), but in that case they wouldn't get any money at all (at least not from anyone bound by such a policy).

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.

You realize that a ton of countries have good or even better building codes than the USA?

Even without for profit firms?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com