[chrisseaton]

> none of the fees paid to access the final document go to the original authors

Isn’t this normal in life? Most people are paid salaries or contracts for a job, not a proportion of sales.

An engineer at Google is paid to build an advert system but they don’t get a proportion of the advert fees.

> some of those "employers" actually pay further fees

Why have you put employers in scare quotes? Do you doubt they’re employing anyone?

And they don’t have to put anyone on the committee writing the standard if they don’t want to.

[iso1210]

The original author is the company. The company doesn't get paid by ISO for making the standards, and indeed might have to pay ISO to submit the standards. ISO then pays others to view those standards. At least that's what the argument is.

The company may have employees that write the standard, that's immaterial. You're equating "Author" with "Employee" rather than "Company"

[chrisseaton]

The company writes the standard because it wants the standard to exist. You're making it into a business transaction between the company and the standards body, when really it's a community interaction, beneficial in their minds for both the company and the industry. The standards body is just a facilitator for the companies which are members.

It's not supposed to be a money-making opportunity.

[necovek]

I find it bad because I believe they could optimize in a way to sustain the organization on membership fees itself. Eg. doubling those fees (21M CHF from membership in 2020 out of total 42M revenue) would have achieved this for 2020 without any optimization on their part.

Or they could become more frugal. Eg. simply by removing the overhead of managing *sale" of electronic documents, they could optimize at least a little bit.

Membership fees are stable, yet royalties are fluctuating. As a non-profit, they've got to end the year on 0, so they'll always spend whatever they earn.