"Breaking the law" and "infringing copyright" are orthogonal. It becomes the responsibility of the copyright holder to sue for infringement. In this case, howev

"Breaking the law" and "infringing copyright" are orthogonal. It becomes the responsibility of the copyright holder to sue for infringement. In this case, however, it's in the copyright holder's interest to not do that: as a result of these documents being referenced into law, others must obtain a license (e.g. by paying a fee) to access them. 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.