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 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.

It is. After all it is not in the interests of anyone who is established in the field to make competition easy.

Source: work for a medical billing company, have had to deal with this garbage before.

https://icd.who.int/en

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.

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.

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".)

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.

"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."

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.)