Ask HN: Building Codes are Unfairly/Illegally Paywalled, how to bypass? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Building Codes are Unfairly/Illegally Paywalled, how to bypass?

4 pointsCrimsonCape8 comments

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?

I'm guessing that the difference is that these codes are not actual law. For example, in the electrical world, the relevant code in the USA this is NFPA 70, National Electrical Code (NEC) from the NFPA, but these are just codes -- they are not law per se, but may be used to apply related legislation.

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.

Did your local jurisdiction adopt NFPA 70 or NEC? If so, the presiding judge in the 5th circuit case stated this:

"The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become "the law". Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law? Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder's exclusive prerogatives."

The NEC and NFPA model codes (i.e. NFPA 70, NFPA 101) are most certainly model codes that fall under the ruling.

Therefore, should I be able to download a PDF file of the complete up-to-date code from here?

https://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/7/0/nfpa-70

Well this is part of the reason for this topic.

NFPA Link has terms of service that are due to the "model code" being proprietary. Accessing the content via that NFPA Link endpoint puts you at the mercy of the terms of whatever the private third party offers.

But as the law stated, once the code is adopted, it becomes public domain. I would guess that NFPA has no legal obligation to offer a "public domain" portal, so the question becomes at what cost should local governments buy server space and host the texts and make the code available to the public domain? Especially because it appears they are legally obligated to do so? My research shows they currently don't offer it.

I find this kind of like "right to repair" except to "right to access public domain code text." In this case, the right exists, but no endpoint exists, so if there's no endpoint, does the right really exist?

What is the reasoning that they are obligated to provide it? I'm no expert in this area, but I don't think the fact that they are public domain means they are obligated to provide them to you? Is there a separate requirement on law text that says they must be provided? (It would be sane for that to exist, but...)

You could try FOIAing them or suing them if you think there is an actual obligation.

I don't believe code publishers are obligated to publish their model code. Especially because the local jurisdiction might adopt amendments that differ from the code they wrote and control.

Therefore I think they are perfectly ok offering a generic endpoint to the general public as a convenience, and have no liability when the adopted code might differ from what they provided.

From the government side, I believe that since the courts determined that adopted model codes are public domain, they are obligated to publish the code. Is the government required to publish text version of all applicable laws?

What did your intellectual property lawyer tell you when you talked to them about this?

Can you post some examples?

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