[MisterTea]

> Next, it would be great if published standards were freely available. It is astonishing to me that they are not.

THIS. Especially for things like the NEC and other building safety regulations. Then move on to ISO/ANSI/IEC/etc standards.

[toasterlovin]

FYI, you can view the NEC for free. You have to have an account and it’s a janky web view of a PDF, which is suboptimal, but it is free.

[MisterTea]

I should add that India does this for some IEC documents and other standards under open information acts.

[acyou]

While you're at it, make textbooks free. And movies. And games. Who is going to pay for standards development? How will it maintain a stable funding mechanism? I refer you to recent developments with the US government.

[horsawlarway]

If an AHJ wants to make the standard a legal requirement... Then they pay for it and provide it to all people under their jurisdiction. Full fucking stop.

I don't accept the idea that copyright provides value here.

You are advocating for "secret" laws, which are pay to view, but must legally be followed. I don't think there's any possible ethical argument to be made that's an acceptable state.

[thinkmassive]

AHJ = authority having jurisdiction

[acyou]

I used to think that way as well, then I started to participate in standards development. Now, I think it's more valuable to society to have the standards properly developed, funded and regulated.

You could say the same of literally any other aspect of society. Why can't it be free? Well, someone has to pay. It's a nice thought, until it meets reality.

Regulation has a cost and a benefit. Compliance has a cost and a benefit. Non compliance has a cost and can have a benefit. People using/complying to standards usually benefit and are therefore good people to have pay the compliance cost, rather than shifting the tax burden onto society as a whole (someone else can pay)! It's not free, we just need to pay.

(If you're not paying, you're the product)

[horsawlarway]

It's almost like there's a functional method to achieve this through.... drumroll... taxation.

I'm literally paying those folks to do the job anyways with my property taxes. Then I'm paying them again to actually file a permit. Then I'm paying them again for the inspection.

The costs of standards development is a pittance compared to most other expenditures these entities make.

Your approach leads to de-facto guild systems where inside knowledge is transferred within a legally permitted group, and then used to extract more tax from people through the form of elevated service prices and reduced competition. Further compounded by the fact that this inside knowledge is, quite literally, just the legal requirement.

Frankly - no. I cannot disagree more strongly. I don't believe secret, pay-to-view laws should allowed. Full stop.

If ignorance of the law is not an excuse - the law damn well better by publicly displayed and accessible for all.

My county doesn't even have the modern NEC codes available for library checkout (the latest edition they have is 2001).

---

I don't mind paying for the regulation, I think the current closed source and copyright protected payment structure is unethical. Frankly - I also don't think it's working very well.

[acyou]

Well, existing taxes are for very specific and well delineated purposes. We can re-name the fees we pay to access the standard to "Standards User Tax", and it gets collected when you want to access the standard. Obviously, we wouldn't want a vague general tax to cover a wide variety of general purposes, we want to keep things as specific as possible.

Is it that the taxes are already high enough, and we feel that the existing tax base should also cover the cost of standards development, maintenance and distribution? By what mechanism would individual government bodies levying taxes direct the appropriate funds to standards related activities?

If you think that the regulatory and building code system isn't working and want to act to change the status quo, you should travel to other jurisdictions that don't have a robust system of standards. Then it would become abundantly clear that standards development and adherence is expensive and worth every penny.

Yes, a guild system, it's called the building trades, we have this where I live and it works pretty well.

As for secret laws, well, welcome to the western world. No one ever told us what all of the laws are that we're expected to follow. We are never issued a little book. We are expected to learn, read, ask, and pay for resources required in order to live as functioning members of society. There are other things we have to pay for. Clothes, for instance, are not issued for free by the government, but wearing them is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. Do we consider that governments should provide those for free?