A project to make expensive, legally-mandated standards documents public | Hacker News Reader

A project to make expensive, legally-mandated standards documents public

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The article makes reference to the need for Standards organizations to charge for standards so continue fundind the development of those standards. I've contributed/am contributing to three ANSI standards and we're not compensated for that work. In fact we have to spend money out of our own (or our firms') pockets to work on these - I'm spending $1,000 to travel to Washington DC next week for a meeting of one of these standards groups.

When complete, these standards will probably sell for $80-$100 a pop and I'll see none of that. ANSI as an organization will contribute by providing some editing and review (although the bulk of that work will be done by unpaid peer reviewers) and it's necessary for them to charge a nominal fee to support their work, but having seen this process from the inside, I don't see where this money is going.

We need standards, but the gatekeeper aspect is a sham. When contributors start getting paid for our efforts, maybe I'll change my mind.

That sounds EXACTLY like the scientific publishing industry. What is the motivation for you to do free work for these parasites?

He can sell his experience to companies looking to implement those standards? Companies get a solution to the coordination problem of creating standards in the first place?

What is the motivation for you to do free work for these parasites?

In most cases, both in scientific publishing and in writing standards, people aren't doing free work, they're getting paid by their employers. So the next question is what is the motivation of these employer to pay for you to work for these parasites. In most cases the answer is a mixture of prestige, advertising, influence and early access.

The typical situation in science is that you're expected to cover "100%" of your time through some combination of grants and teaching. There is no specific allocation for "professional service", but you're expected to do it anyway.

With standards bodies, it's common that some representative of each organization is required to attend meetings to retain voting privileges. So if the organization wants a chance to influence the Standard, they need to send people and pay for it. One reason is prestige/advertising, but a Standard also enables tactical advantages, e.g., (a) include feature X that lets us showcase our hardware or (b) prevent feature Y that would be expensive for us to implement.

As I wrote, we need standards, and those standards to a lot of good in terms of setting best-practices and documenting procedures than can result in repeatable, robust results. Being able to point to standards compliance is also helpful in reducing the effort involved in describing and justifying procedures/designs.

The problem is in the dissemination of the standards. Of course folks can try to implement and promulgate standards themselves, but IME they have a hard time getting traction without the "blessing" of a major organization.

And to be honest, contributing to a standard looks good on a resume.

" and those standards to a lot of good in terms of setting best-practices and documenting procedures than can result in repeatable, robust results."

Especially the more closed/monetized ones.

Good standards are open and developed together with an implementation of it.

And don't get me started on HL7

Nothing in what I said pointed toward closed standards, and I wasn't referring to closed standards. In my field (acoustics/noise & vibration control) we generally don't have closed standards and rely on standards to produce results that we have confidence in.

I should have gotten a hint from your username.

I was imagining one thing, but apparently it's something else. What you said makes sense in your field (and in others), and of course, it's non-closed standarts

I agree with the article 100% - laws need to be freely accessible to everyone. One particular standard which I hope they publish in the future is the HIPAA standard(http://store.x12.org/store/healthcare-5010-original-guides). It's pretty outrageous that to implement any form of electronic interfacing with Medicare, a government insurer, you have to pay $2500. And it's not just a one time cost - you have to keep buying them every couple of years to keep track of new additions / errata.

Absolutely. It's unbelievable that the WPC gets a monopoly on the healthcare data interchange standard.

You don't have to keep buying the HIPAA standard from them. It is freely available by FOIA request.

What you are buying is an edited guide that includes the latest version of the standards compiled into a single document, rather than a collection of separate documents and their amendments that you must piece together yourself into a single coherent document.

> Upon the close of the May 1 comment period, it is our intention to begin posting these 73 standards in HTML and begin the process of providing a unified, easy-to-use interface to all public safety standards in the Code of Federal Regulations

This deadline has come and gone, and apparently they've gone ahead and published a number of standards:

https://law.resource.org/pub/12tables.html

The background -- particularly Supreme Court cases -- given by public.resource in the article and the above link make the situation pretty clear: If it's a law, it's in the public domain, and it's legal to publish these standards. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)

The legal question I have in mind is the following: The government adopts as law technical documents developed and copyrighted by a (nominally) private body, and thereby places them in the public domain. The authoring organization expected to generate revenue by selling them and now that is much harder, since they are in the public domain. It looks an awful lot like the government is using eminent domain: Government appropriation of private property (a copyrighted work) for public purposes (writing laws). Under the eminent domain clause of the Constitution (assuming all parties are US-based), shouldn't the government pay the organization for using its legislative powers to take their copyrighted work and place it in the public domain?

If the organization is entitled to eminent domain compensation, how do you fairly determine the value of the documents? Clearly you can't use the number of downloads from public.resource times the price the standards body would have charged. This falls victim to Hollywood's classic piracy fallacy: Assuming that anyone who downloads things for free would have bought them at full price if the download hadn't been available. (This assumption obviously defies all economic theory and common sense.) In this situation there's another effect, possibly even stronger: Relatively few people would have cared enough about these documents to spend thousands of dollars on them if they hadn't been made into law.

Would the standards body still be entitled to eminent domain compensation if they wrote the documents under the expectation that they would become law, or actively lobbied the government to make them into law?

THe government is not using eminent domain, as it is not appopriating any private tangible property. Moreover, it is a simple matter to evade copyright by simply changing the language in whatever laws are adopted. Finally, if any organization were to attempt to demand compensation for its "standards" it would quickly find itself ignored and its standard would be worth less than the electricity used to render them.

In other words, the standards body would not be entitled to any compensation, nor should it expect any compensation if it has any hope of its "standards" becoming law.

This is a big problem in Europe as well. In the UK increasingly the building regulations refer you to British and EU standards which are very expensive. Want to know the EU standard methods for designing drains for buildings? Be prepared to pay £720(US$1160) [0]

[0] http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/SearchResults/?q=gravity%20drain...

At the same time, I assume a standard like that only applies to people designing drainage systems for sale within the EU.

Presumably if you are a corporation looking to design and sell drainage systems, £720 to gain access to the relevant standards is a relatively small cost in the grand scheme of things.

Sure, but what if you think you could come up with a way to design a system for cheap and you want to make sure your system is compliant with code?

Nope, these apply to the design of any building with a sink or a toilet in it. That's just the standards for the drainage pipe sizing, layout and design of pipe bedding and cover. To be fair, for a very simple building you can probably get enough information from a manufacturers website to get by, but then you don't know how much of what they are telling you is sales patter designed to make their product seem like the only solution to the problem. For example, there are more than 320 standards referenced in the domestic version of the Scottish Building Standards and while you don't need access to all of them there are plenty that are very useful to have access to.

There's certainly other models. Not sure if they are better or worse. There's the W3C model. I don't even know what that is honestly as although they help propose standards much of what they do is document what browser vendors have implemented after the fact and then try to get the browser vendors to agree. I don't know what their funding model is

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/fees

Their specs are public though

The Khronos Group (OpenGL, OpenCL, etc) is a pay to participate organization but they make their specs public.

My point is only that even if ANSI, which others have brought up, needs money their model of charging for the specs isn't the only way to do it.

As for the original article it certainly does seem outrageous that there are laws that require you to follow some standard and you have to pay to access that standard.

This article is from last March. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to post a follow up article?

There was a court case about building codes, where the court ruled that you can't charge for the standard because it was the law. Let me see if I can find it...

Edit: I can't find it. If someone more versed on finding court cases can find it that would be awesome. IIRC, it involved a company suing a city(?) for publishing a copywrited building code they had written but the court ruled that you can't charge for the law.

I believe you are referring to the case cited in the first section of this article: Veeck v. Southern Building Code Congress, 293 F.3d 791 (5th Circuit, 2002). (https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/293/293.F3d.791.9)...

That's what I get for only reading the first few lines....

Its a worthy crusade and one which has such sweet irony. Standards organizations who spend thousands to get their standard incorporated into the law so that they can sell millions of dollars worth of documents to municipalities and other organizations that have to comply.

Only to have all of their efforts become the biggest information give away in decades! Priceless.

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