[gchpaco]

The law is non-copyrightable. However a lot of state laws say "You will build your building according to Document X by Corporation Y" and that is copyrighted and not given out without a lot of money. The reason why these exist is that lawmakers aren't experts in, say, concrete; and those who are tend to be employed privately, and make industrial standards. As an example consider specifying that a program will be written in C (a bad idea here, but saying "structural members for buildings shall be steel as defined by this standard" isn't a terrible idea). C is defined by the relevant ANSI or ISO standard; now if you want to know what the law actually says, you have to pony up the money for an official standard.

I don't know what settled law is about this, but it is at the least morally questionable activity.

[dfc]

The law is fairly settled, however the Supremes have not said anything on the matter yet. The Veeck decision is the best answer as of now and Veeck seems to be pretty clear:

"The issue in this en banc case is the extent to which a private organization may assert copyright protection for its model codes, after the models have been adopted by a legislative body and become "the law". Specifically, may a code-writing organization prevent a website operator from posting the text of a model code where the code is identified simply as the building code of a city that enacted the model code as law? Our short answer is that as law, the model codes enter the public domain and are not subject to the copyright holder's exclusive prerogatives." (Veeck v. SOUTHERN BLDG. CODE CONGRESS INTERN., 293 F. 3d 791 - Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit 2002)[1]

You do not need to pony up the money if Carl Malamud already has a copy of the code. If you have purchased one of these codes and are done with the hardcopy get in touch with Malamud and see if he wants it.

Cory Doctorow explains Carl Malamud's efforts after the Veeck decision: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/liberating-americas-secret....

May god continue to bless Mr. Malamud and all of the great work he has done...

[1] http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6755260615473645...

[Tichy]

The scary consequence could be that eventually there will be laws prescribing certain programming techniques for software projects.

In Germany I think it is almost already the case, because if your software project goes awry, the judge will want to know that used current best practices of software development. I only picked that up in passing, though, reading about a case with another focus. But it scares me, because I don't necessarily agree with all current "best practices". Imagine being sued because you didn't include 99% test coverage. Or worse, because you didn't use Java.

[thomasz]

Requiring a certain degree of test coverage by law sounds like a good idea for life-critical systems.

[Tichy]

So people will write some crappy tests to satisfy the law. I don't think much would be gained. But consultants would be enabled to earn more money, that is true.