from the ignorance-is-no-excuse-under-the-law...but-if-you-cannot-find-out-what-the-law-IS... dept.
This week, open and equitable access to the law got a bit closer. For many years, EFF has defended Public.Resource.Org in its quest to improve public access to the law — including standards, like the National Electrical Code, that legislators and agencies have made into binding regulations. In two companion lawsuits, six standards development organizations sued Public Resource in 2013 for posting standards online. They accused Public Resource of copyright infringement and demanded the right to keep the law behind paywalls.
Yesterday, three of those organizations dropped their suit. The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), and the American Psychological Association (APA) publish a standard for writing and administering tests. The standard is widely used in education and employment contexts, and several U.S. federal and state government agencies have incorporated it into their laws.
[...] Three other standards development groups (the American Society for Testing and Materials, the National Fire Protection Association, and the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers) continue to pursue their suit against Public Resource. We're confident that the court will rule that laws are free for all to read, speak, and share with the world.
Related Stories
Digital librarian, Karen Coyle, has written about controlled digital lending (warning for PDF), where an artificial scarcity is applied to digital artifacts to limit concurrent access similar to the limitations that a finite number of objects exhibit in libraries' physical collections. This concept raises a lot of questions about not just copyright and digital versus physical, but also about reading in general. Some authors and publisher associations have already begun to object to controlled digital lending. However, few set aside misinformation and misdirection to allow for a proper, in-depth discussion of the issues.
We now have another question about book digitization: can books be digitized for the purpose of substituting remote lending in the place of the lending of a physical copy? This has been referred to as "Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)," a term developed by the Internet Archive for its online book lending services. The Archive has considerable experience with both digitization and providing online access to materials in various formats, and its Open Library site has been providing digital downloads of out of copyright books for more than a decade. Controlled digital lending applies solely to works that are presumed to be in copyright.
Controlled digital lending works like this: the Archive obtains and retains a physical copy of a book. The book is digitized and added to the Open Library catalog of works. Users can borrow the book for a limited time (2 weeks) after which the book "returns" to the Open Library. While the book is checked out to a user no other user can borrow that "copy." The digital copy is linked one-to-one with a physical copy, so if more than one copy of the physical book is owned then there is one digital loan available for each physical copy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @07:50PM
This looks like a good result.
However, for the second act, one guess is that the standards-creating-orgs will ask the states/feds to remove references (to the standards they have developed) in the laws. That way, users who want to use these standards will have to buy copies again...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 17 2020, @08:30PM (17 children)
This is completely wrong. From what I'm reading here, private organizations established a bunch of standards for themselves - I'm sure after a lot of money for work experience, testing, and research. The legislature then started referencing those private standards in law and code. Resource.org then published those private copyrighted texts online for free.
Yes, we should be able to get free access to laws and codes we have to follow. What does that have to do with a private organization giving up their copyright on something they made?
We shouldn't be putting private copyrighted material into law. Imagine you write a book. Some bureaucrats write a law referencing that book. Congratulations, you now no longer own the book.
Imagine a stretch of an example - you make a new very accurate and cheap multimeter. People like it, and all the contractors start using it. It's based on some new tech resulting from millions of dollars and man-hours of your research. It's a good product. Now your state writes some new building codes, and the code states "when running electrical wiring, there must be a maximum loss of 1 ohm from one end of the cable to another, as shown by this specific widely used multimeter." So now a bunch of people show up at your door demanding the product for free.
The problem is with the law makers, not with the private organizations, who are now rightfully suing the people stealing their work. And the first people who stole their work were the people who incorporated their work into building codes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @08:55PM (2 children)
Maybe.
The industry standards that I've been involved with were almost all written by volunteers (including small contributions by me). I've always been a little pissed off that these standards were sold for exorbitant prices, much more than needed to support the office staff that coordinates the standard-writing efforts.
While I'm self-employed, most of the other volunteers work for large companies in our industry and their volunteer contributions are done on "company time", so effectively the big companies are supporting the standards-generation-process with free expert labor.
Like many so-called not-for-profits these days, the top managers of my professional org pay themselves very well--I checked their government non-profit-status filing once (forgot how I accessed it).
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 17 2020, @09:59PM (1 child)
This is a strawman. The standards themselves are not in question, nor are copyrighted. You can't copyright a standard. The literal text that was published is. Instead of referencing a private standard in the law, an official text needed to be made describing those standards, without copy and paste from the private publication and without reference to it.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:11PM
This is not creative literature, this is describing a standard.How many ways are to write down the same standard?
Let's suppose I pay for the text of a standard and study it enough to implement It. Then I decide to write a text describing the standard. I'm sure the text would very similar to the original enough to be sued.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @09:37PM (1 child)
Eminent domain, motherfucker.
Most of these organizations probably lobbied to have their standards put into the laws though...
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 17 2020, @10:02PM
No eminent domain was involved here. You need to look up what eminent domain is, and how it's done before talking about that, motherfucker.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 17 2020, @09:44PM (3 children)
They established the standards with the hope (and active promotion) that they would be incorporated by reference into law so they could make a small fortune selling copies. This is them sitting on their own bear trap.
If legislators commission another standard and incorporate it instead, the current publications become worthless. Their only commercial value comes from being part of the law.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 17 2020, @10:08PM (2 children)
No one is claiming the standard is under copyright - a standard is not something you can copyright. I can describe something - write a book on how a glass of water should properly be poured in a fine dining restaurant. 2/3 full, at 15 degrees celcius, placed in front and to the right of the plate. You are free to describe it too in your book, also as 2/3 full, at 15 degrees celcius, placed in front and to the right of the plate.
What you cannot do is take my book on pouring water and make it available online on your website. Which is what was done here. I did not set a bear trap by writing my book and advertising it. You stole material I wrote, verbatim, instead of writing your own book describing how to achieve the same outcome.
nice strawman.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:22PM (1 child)
No, you set the bear trap when you lobbied your legislature to make your book the actual legal standard that must be followed to the letter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:27AM
> when you lobbied your legislature
Professional & standards-writing orgs are often set up by the leading companies in an industry. The initial goal is to standardize the things that every player has to do anyway, makes things more efficient. But eventually, the org grows to be a power unto itself and, since it was formed to write standards, it continues to pump them out faster and faster.
I think you can see where this ends--eventually the standards become so elaborate and complex that it becomes a barrier to entry for new companies in the industry. Once they are made part of law, the monopoly (or duopoly, etc) is actually legislated. Now the winning big players really don't need to fund the original org anymore, their position is secure. But the org wants to survive, so it charges more and more for the standard documents.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 17 2020, @10:00PM (5 children)
Then that is who the copyright owners should sue. Regardless of what is in the law, copyright or not, the law must be freely accessible as long as we are subject to its whimsy.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Saturday October 17 2020, @10:11PM (4 children)
That is who they are suing. The people who verbatim took their text and published it on their own website. It is not the job of the people who wrote the text to make it available. Anyone is free to write their own text describing the standard and publish that, instead of stealing content someone else wrote.
There are limitless combinations of words to describe how to pour a glass of water to half full. They took the combination someone else wrote and published it, instead of writing how to do it themselves.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 17 2020, @10:29PM (3 children)
Certainly does not preclude their right to do so. Public policy must be public domain.
Not stealing if they were contracted to write it.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:19PM (2 children)
Absolutely agree!
Laws ARE public domain, by definition.
Submission of anything to be written into law, at least in my book, implies the work to become public.
As the public, by definition, must now comply with the letter of the LAW.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:19AM (1 child)
It's nice that we all (who are discussing this) live in places where the rule of law generally prevails. There are still large parts of the world where there is no rule of law, where rule of the strong prevails and is capricious*. Feel free to correct me, I wasn't a very good student in civics (long ago), but I believe that the concept of the rule of law, written laws available to the public and enforced more or less uniformly, is relatively new in human history.
*given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @01:49PM
OK, let's check our privilege, acknowledge how lucky we are to live in a place that's actually civilized, and observe a moment of silence to honor the victims of lawless places subject to the capricious whim of strongmen rulers.
Now -- what again was your point? That because living in a civilized society is a relatively new thing, historically speaking, it should be ok for private entities to charge extortionate fees for access to legal precepts that we're all subject to? Because the alternative (having free access to the letter of the law you're subject to) is so new, meaning we're being privileged undeserving brats to expect it?
Or were you just virtue signaling? :)
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Saturday October 17 2020, @11:26PM
Right, blame is misdirected: it should be directed to the government!
I checked a couple of publications [archive.org] and they start with a Certificate by Authority of the United States of America, incorporating the standards into a legally binding document for all residents and citizens of the USA, indicating that noncompliance can carry criminal penalties.
Therefore, the standards have become, by government act, part of the law and should be freely accesible.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:16AM
As someone who works as an Engineer in the Building Construction industry, there are codes and standards. Codes (such as those developed by ICC) are meant to be directly adopted by various (Federal, State, or Local) jurisdictions. Standards, such as those created by NFPA (for example NFPA 70 AKA the NEC) or ASHRAE are written in code enforceable format/language. On their own standards are not code, but they can be adopted by a jurisdiction effectively as code. It's not like NFPA, ASHRAE, etc. don't know how their content will be used - it's written in a way to enable this. ICC, ASHRAE and likely others are starting to see the legal grey area of copyrighted content effectively being law, and have put free viewers on their websites for some of their content.