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In the US, it's been ruled many times that if the government mandates a standard, then it must be publicly available for free to be enforceable. Which is why,
by delfinom 3y ago
In the US, it's been ruled many times that if the government mandates a standard, then it must be publicly available for free to be enforceable.
Which is why, when the NFPA (private org) fire code is mandated, you can use a really shitty web based viewer to view it for free, or pay the normal $200 for a hard copy or pdf. All stemming from a lawsuit.
It's interesting the EU isn't the same
- AlotOfReading 3y agoThis is substantially less true in practice than you'd think. I'm in automotive, so let's take ISO-26262, one of the main standards used to design your vehicle. The contents of that are encoded in the NHTSA validation tests, basic compliance procedures, and all the certification paperwork, but the standard itself is "voluntary" and hence non-free. It's a massive standard with a dozen different parts that have to be purchased separately for a couple hundred each. Since group licensing also tends to charge by # of people with access, beancounters naturally silo access to this critical safety standard, with many of the thousands of engineers who work on any particular vehicle designing to a standard they've never read for themselves. Standards should simply be freely available. It takes time and effort to write them, but the consequences of limited access are borne by society.