> 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

> 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 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?