Liberating the Laws You Must Pay To Read 223
Writing for Boing Boing, Carl Malamud describes the campaign he's been waging to let U.S. citizens read the public safety standards that have become part of federal law — without needing to pay for the privilege. "These public safety standards govern and protect a wide range of activity, from how bicycle helmets are constructed to how to test for lead in water to the safety characteristics of hearing aids and protective footwear." Despite a U.S. Appeals Court ruling which said 'the law' should be in the public domain, many safety codes are still privately produced and then distributed for a fee, to recoup development costs. "Public.Resource.Org has a mission of making the law available to all citizens, and these technical standards are a big black hole in the legal universe. We've taken a gamble and spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 of these technical public safety standards that are incorporated into the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations." Malamud and his Public.Resource.Org foundation are trying — very cautiously — to make these laws more broadly available. "...even though we strongly believe that the documents are not entitled to copyright protection, and moreover that our limited print run is in any case definitely fair use, if a judge were to decide that what we did was breaking the law, 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000 in potential liability. While whales may make bigger bets, we draw the line at $273 million."
Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excuse. (Score:5, Insightful)
So why doesn't anybody ask about "inability to afford a copy of the law" as an excuse.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignorance of the law becomes quite common when you have a ridiculous amount of inane laws.
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Not only that - if the law isn't so fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away, how the hell are the lawyer vampire class ever going to justify being a drain on society by requiring you to consult a lawyer before doing anything?
Regulatory capture was invented by the lawyer class. That's why the first thing a sane society would do is outlaw lawyers.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what you get when you allow private industry and corporatist groups like ALEC to write the laws.
The reason we have laws that are "fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away" is because there's somebody who is profiting from those laws being that way. There is no other reason.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you can pretty much extend that to "a ____ lawyer has lobbied for more complicated ____ laws to increase the number of people hiring ____ lawyers" and still have a factual statement.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Funny)
I think you can pretty much extend that to "a ____ lawyer has lobbied for more complicated ____ laws to increase the number of people hiring ____ lawyers" and still have a factual statement.
a GODDAMN lawyer has lobbied for more complicated GODDAMN laws to increase the number of people hiring GODDAMN lawyers
it works
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I dare you to Google "potato law".
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&output=search&q=potato+law&oq=potato+law [google.com]
I don't take well to dares
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:4, Interesting)
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> The regular laws are bad enough.
Agreed. The problem is people are unable to discern between:
- the spirit of the law, and
- the letter of the law.
partially due to crap laws that no one wants to "fix" because there is too much money in the system (as one of your examples points out), it is in a lawyer's best interest to have as many convoluted laws as possible, and people generally don't give a dam about bad laws -- they would rather bitch about sports / music / movies.
i.e. The letter of the law s
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That's what you get when you allow private industry and corporatist groups like ALEC to write the laws.
The reason we have laws that are "fucking convoluted and obtuse and hidden away" is because there's somebody who is profiting from those laws being that way. There is no other reason.
You get corporations with such an interest in the law because the law started having such a heavy hand in how you do business. If you can't open a simple food stand without getting 5 permits and inspections from 3 agencies you can bet that the entire industry is going to start seeing that as a cost of doing business and start using their lobbying power to either reduce that cost or make that cost profitable.
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start using their lobbying power to make that cost even larger so no one else can enter the market and provide competition.
FTFY
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You think it's "the State" that has the stranglehold of power over your life?
Don't be ridiculous.
Try this: Go through your day tomorrow and count the number of times where you are doing something you would rather not be doing, or not doing something you would rather be doing, because of "the State". Start when your alarm clock rings. I'm betting that if you are honest, you will learn that it's not t
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:4, Insightful)
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are all such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20."
Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, "but he got $10!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!"
"That's true!!" shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!"
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!"
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
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For those who understand, no explanation is needed. For those who do not understand, no explanation is possible.
And then there's the large array of people w
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The hidden "laws" (which is a bad description, what is really privately-copyrighted are standards which are referenced in regulations authorized under law) don't benefit) don't benefit lawyers particularly, who they benefit are the industry groups that make the standards and the f
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:4, Interesting)
You* elect the poiliticians that enact such complicated laws and the bureaucracy that uses your ignorance of the laws to do things pretty much how they want to do them.
Although I deal with 'regulators' on a daily basis, I have only applied the law as written rather than lobbying for new codes, rules, or procedures. Like most lawyers, I'm essentially a guide concerning a subject that people have no interest in learning about until they have a very specific need, and even then are not interested in doing the leg work of learning it themselves. You may as well outlaw tourist guides, reference librarians, and historians. The only thing they do is filter information that is convoluted, obtuse, and hidden away as well.
*Not you specifically, but the collective you that responds to political pandering and is loathe to acutally think through issues or accept a difficult compromise. [snark]You specifically have failed to think through the lawyer issue, and the second thing a sane society would do is outlaw your ability to vote.[/snark]
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Interesting)
Over 50% of the US House of Representatives are lawyers. Likewise for the Senate.
You* are full of shit.
*Your profession and collective members, as such.
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They don't have to be inane. Simply a ridiculous amount of laws leads to forced ignorance.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
And corruption. Let a system grow complex enough, and the little guys won't be able to accomplish anything, because they won't have the money, the cronies, or the will to compromise, to make the rusty wheels of the broken system turn. It happened in IT with the introduction of *silly* patents (I have nothing against patenting things that a couple random programmers can't replicate in a weekend).
Like, say, the byzantine empire, such systems usually imploded, people stop giving a damn about defending it. But now we have technology and such a broken system can go on for eternity because computers and robots don't get demotivated. We may fear computers that get too intelligent, but the problem is with the not-smart-enough ones.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
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Considering that the federal government willingly admits they have secret, non-publicized interpretations [aclu.org] for laws, I would say that ignorance of the law (or rather, how it is being enforced) is now the perfect excuse.
But if you run afoul of those "laws", you still don't need to know them because you end up dead.
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Don't forget about the judges who apply foreign law.
Aside from extradition and such (or local definitions of obscene, done now on a state level of 'foreign" where extraditions among the states have happened to prosecute someone in Florida for actions taken in California), when does this happen?
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VA hospitals are unconstitutional?
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In that case, why not just draft everyone into the Army for Universal Healthcare?
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The VA is unconstitutional. The army should have been disbanded long ago.
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While funding for standing armies was supposed to be temporary, the Navy and government support of the militia was not. I think the VA would be easily justified under those grounds.
Getting more into grey areas, the constitution also grants the federal government power to collect taxes for the general welfare of the United States, and you could argue that most social programs, including civil government hospitals are just that.
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Getting more into grey areas, the constitution also grants the federal government power to collect taxes for the general welfare of the United States, and you could argue that most social programs, including civil government hospitals are just that.
That is in there to give them the power to tax for the general good, not to tax for the general bad, nor does it (with a non-political reading) give the power to act in the general good, unless enumerated elsewhere.
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And that is the rub, what you see as bad many see as good. Is it good or bad that the EPA forced the cleanup of lake Erie and the Monongahela river in Pittsburgh?
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"(walks away)"
A serious response to a non serious complaint.
Shouldn't you be repairing your buggy whip?
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Last I checked the Constitution is still the Law, and if Congress members (or presidents) are ignoring the law then that IS a serious problem. In fact it's probably why over the last 11 years we have slowly-but-surely lost our various rights (SOPA, ACTA, NDAA jail without trial, and Patriot Act searches without warrants). Because the Constitutional Law is no longer being obeyed by the congress.
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Last I checked, laws have consequences for breaking them. Without consequences, the Constitution is merely the supreme suggestion of the United States.
Make violation of the Constitution a criminal act, then we'll talk.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
I support the congresswoman's response. That question deserved no response for a couple of reasons:
1) In the very pramble the national government is esablished to "promote the general Welfare". While that particular phase is very open to interpretaion, it is hard to see that a publically avalible hospital is not in the direction of "the general Welfare".
2) Section 8 of the Constitution once again allows specifically for taxation "to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States". One could agure that this only means the general welfare of the Unites States as a body and not the individual of it. But that seems contrary to the general spirit of the document, and would have to be decided by the US Supreme Court. Since they have specifically not said so, the overwhelming presumption must be that it is in keeping with the law.
3) Presumably the question was grounded out of something like "why should the government be allowed to complete (unfairly) with private business". But this is a common misconception about corporations and the Constitution. At the founding of the US Constitution corprations were only founded by express will of the goverment, and they were founded to a specific purpose (not profits). The profits were only a sweetener that was allowed to get the job done. Coporartions charters were often specific about the lifetime of the corporation and there were a list of clauses that would end the Coporation if it was found to not be living up to its charter. The modern idea of the corporation as a profit-driven mostly-imortal quasi-person did not start to take hold untill the mid-1800s. For reference I will direct people to the Mercantilism section of the Corporation article in Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#Mercantilism
So if you are a "fundamentalist" about the US Constitution you should expect that the govenement should be the one behind large institutions such as hospitals. It is just that many "Conservatives" have the dream of a golden age in their heads and have proven very willing to not let the truth get in their way.
I for one would like to see a move more in that direction, at least in the requring of Public Coporations to have a charter (I don't see the need for expiry), and to the practice exercise the death penalty on them when they violate it.
Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:5, Insightful)
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Welfare_clause [wikipedia.org]. It's not very clear. It looks like "General Welfare", within the 1900s gradually grew to include more and more things. Fits in very nicely with the expansion of federal power in other areas over our history.
These quotes are also interesting
The two primary authors of the The Federalist essays set forth two separate, conflicting interpretations:
James Madison advocated for the ratification of the Constitution in The Federalist and at the Virginia ratifying convention upon a narrow construction of the clause,asserting that spending must be at least tangentially tied to one of the other specifically enumerated powers, such as regulating interstate or foreign commerce, or providing for the military, as the General Welfare Clause is not a specific grant of power, but a statement of purpose qualifying the power to tax.[9][10]
Alexander Hamilton, only after the Constitution had been ratified,[11] argued for a broad interpretation which viewed spending as an enumerated power Congress could exercise independently to benefit the general welfare, such as to assist national needs in agriculture or education, provided that the spending is general in nature and does not favor any specific section of the country over any other.[12]
Personally, I think only Madison's interpretation fits in with the rest of the document. Otherwise congress can arbitrarily grant themselves new powers without an amendment. What's the point of the amendment process if you can just say "General Welfare". For example, "for the general welfare we enact an income tax". No, they passed an amendment.
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Not to be rude, but you do know what a preamble is, right? While it might seem otherwise blatantly obvious, the purpose of the US Constitution wasn't to enrich a king or grow tobacco for export. It was created to, as one of its main purposes, "promote t
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I'd go with Article I, Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To [...] provide for the [...] general Welfare of the United States
Department of Health (Score:5, Informative)
can you tell me where in the Constitution it gives Congress power to provide government hospitals?
Does the "power to lay and collect taxes" and apply them to "provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" (Article I, section 8) count? Hospitals (are supposed to) defend the public from disease and increase health, which is an aspect of welfare.
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Does the "power to lay and collect taxes" and apply them to "provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States" (Article I, section 8) count?
By inserting "apply them" you have radically changed the meaning of the text to favor your argument. The cause you have misquoted grants the "power to lay and collect taxes". It doesn't grant the power to spend them in any particular way. The specific ways in which that money can be spent are enumerated in the rest of the section. James Madison, the so-called "Father of the Constitution", was quite clear that the so-called "General Welfare" clause was not intended as a blank check:
If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one subject to particular exceptions. It is to be remarked that the phrase out of which this doctrine is elaborated, is copied from the old articles of Confederation, where it was always understood as nothing more than a general caption to the specified powers, and it is a fact that it was preferred in the new instrument for that very reason as less liable than any other to misconstruction.
--James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton (1792-01-21) [emphasis added]
If Congress can apply money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may establish teachers in every State, county, and parish, and pay them out of the public Treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post roads. In short, every thing, from the highest object of State legislation, down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress; for every object I have mentioned would admit the application of money, and might be called, if Congress pleased, provisions for the general welfare.
--James Madison, remarks on the House floor, debates on Cod Fishery bill, (February 1792)
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> can you tell me where in the Constitution it gives Congress power to provide government hospitals?
Interstate commerce clause.
1. In America, getting sick without health insurance is financial suicide.
2. If your company doesn't provide health insurance coverage, you have to purchase an individual policy.
3. Individual policies aren't portable across state lines. If you move to a new state, you have to purchase a new policy.
4. An individual purchasing a new individual policy under point 3 will end up payin
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Congresswoman Pelosi, can you tell me where in the Constitution it gives Congress power to provide government hospitals?
"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."
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What was the literacy rate in his kingdom?
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Re:Ignorance of the Law is supposed to be no excus (Score:4, Funny)
I have plenty. Keep it in a bucket along with other stuff I don't use.
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Just more proof... (Score:2)
I really need to catch the next shuttle off Ferenginar.
Long discussion on reddit (Score:2)
New Age Math? (Score:2)
spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 [...] 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000
Am I the only one who doesn't get the math? Or does the judge exponentially impose penalties under copyright protection?
Re:New Age Math? (Score:5, Interesting)
spent $7,414.26 to buy 73 [...] 25 copies of 73 standards works out to $273,750,000
Am I the only one who doesn't get the math? Or does the judge exponentially impose penalties under copyright protection?
That's exactly what the copyright cartels try to do . 73 standards works x 25 copies each = 1,825 instances of infringement, working out to $150,000 per instance. Considering the MAFIAA likes to say they can claim up to $250,000 per infringement, that's (sadly) on the middle range of what they claim they can demand.
Re:New Age Math? (Score:5, Funny)
The exact equation for copyright damages is value * num_copies * 3 * ha_ha_ur_a_criminal = more_money_than_you'll_ever_see_in_your_life
I'd point you to the statute, but you couldn't afford it.
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What the fuck?
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affort [merriam-webster.com]
And then you quoted the dictionary entry for "afford" with all the d changed to t.
Is this new age spelling to go with the new age math?
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and the millions of people who buy helmets that might want to check that the helmet being bought meets standards/law.. because they don't exactly take the manufacturer at their word..
yea that makes sense.. spend 100$ for a piece of paper that is the law the government would require you to follow for evaluating a 20$ item.
Incorporation by reference... (Score:4, Insightful)
Incorporation by reference is one of the tools that private corporations use to get their will imposed through government regulation. It is a shady practice at best, and leads to all kinds of problems with unfunded mandates being exercised on the people, among other things.
Many standards must be licensed, generate quite a bit of revenue for the private companies that develop them.
It is true that many standards are costly to develop, but therein lies the problem - if we need them, we should be paying for them once and making them available to everyone.
This practice should be immediately outlawed, and all regulatory standards should be made open and free to citizens at no cost.
Here is a listing of all the standards incorporated by reference into the Federal Register:
http://standards.gov/sibr/query/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.main [standards.gov]
See:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporation_by_reference [wikipedia.org]
- http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/cfr/ibr-locations.html [archives.gov]
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Paying for them once? These are all living documents and you are paying for changes from the previous years.
Many of the engineering codes are useful only to businesses and not individuals. Should the ASME code that governs the design of pressure vessels in nuclear reactors be paid for with tax money? It seems to me that paying for them with usage fees is okay most of the time. The ones that have broad applicability (like the NEC) are very inexpensive (under $100 new, even cheaper used).
These have to be paid
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. The ones that have broad applicability (like the NEC) are very inexpensive (under $100 new, even cheaper used).
$100 is a week's food and entertainment for some people. Sorry, for some families. You think that's fair to charge that just so that they can know the law?
It's the law. THE LAW. Do not demand that people respect and obey it - at pain of criminal prosecution, and all that entails - then refuse to let them know what it is.
Shit, you want to know what the law is in the UK? It's on the fucking Internet: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ [legislation.gov.uk]
There. That wasn't hard.
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The problem is that asking families to pay more in taxes to make the rules for constructing things like pressure vessels at nuclear reactors public is offensive as well. It's essentially a transfer of wealth from the public to the businesses built on these codes.
Laws referencing SAE and UL standards. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is probably done on purpose.
A large corporation can afford to follow Congressional laws and go buy all these private, expensive standards. Small businesses cannot. It's yet another way that regulations are used by megacorps to protect themselves from new, upstart competition.
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1) If you are running a business, $7500 for all the standards in the federal code is not a lot of money. You'll spend much more than that on your first month's payroll, or rent, etc.
2) Most of these regulations are for checking that something is made correctly and won't kill or injure people. If you are a citizen (not a business), why do you need the regulations and standards on how to build something?
2) You probably don't need more than a few of them for whatever widget you are producing. For example, if y
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Where did you get the $7500 figure? It appears you are underestimating the costs of complying with the various regulations (such as making sure a banana has 25 degrees curvature, else it must be discarded) the government has imposed. Any one regulation is not a big deal but take all 150,000 pages of the current code, and it adds up to millions of dollars.
Oh and no I'm not anti-regulation, anymore than I am anti-government. Obviously we need a little of both.
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2) Most of these regulations are for checking that something is made correctly and won't kill or injure people. If you are a citizen (not a business), why do you need the regulations and standards on how to build something?
Are we so far along the corporation = business curve that we forget the role of craftsmen? Any given one of us - me, you - can choose to build and sell something. For some things we may not have the capital to do so, but for something like a bicycle helmet mentioned in other posts, I think I could afford the start-up costs to make and sell them in small quantities. However, the law says that selling them is illegal unless they meet a list of specifications. Except the law won't tell me the list of speci
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$7500 won't by all the private standards referenced in the Code of Federal Regulations. The organization referenced in TFS spent that much to by 73 of those standards, which wasn't all of them (they were only a subset of those that are "public safety standards", they weren't all of the private public safety standards referenced in the CFR, and public safety standards aren't the only standards referenced i
Re:Laws referencing SAE and UL standards. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not always the way it works, though. The following is a bit off-topic, and mirrors something I've said before in some older discussion that I don't care to find at the moment. :P
I work for a semi-large (>$1B annual sales) specialty chemical and polymer company. We have a dedicated group of people whose jobs revolve specifically around maintaining compliance with the various standards from OSHA, EPA, FDA, etc. They keep us meeting our customers' needs and expectations, in addition to keeping us safe, clean, and in compliance with all the appropriate laws and regulations.
In our specific industry, there are a small handful of global companies of similar size, and tons of smaller, regional companies (usually privately owned) who are two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the big boys. These companies don't have teams of people devoted to regulatory compliance - often, they don't even have one dedicated person. Likewise, our customers come in all kinds of sizes. Paralleling our industry, each specific market usually has a few big boys and countless smaller players.
With these small companies - on both sides of supply - there's a significant amount of (sometimes willful) ignorance of the law. Neither the supplier or the customer may be aware, for example, that they're not supposed to be using various chlorinated solvents to improve the performance of the material, which enables them to use cheaper, lower-performance polymers to make, say, packaging coatings or adhesives. We know that we're not allowed to do such things, and that puts us at a cost disadvantage. If we were to do what they do, we'd get slapped down hard because not only are we a big, juicy-looking target for the fairly-rare regulatory review, but since we knew better it becomes a willful violation, which usually bumps the fines up by a factor of ten or more.
The little fish can plead ignorance, if they even get reviewed, which in my anecdotal experience I've not ever seen happen.
On the topic at hand, I believe laws should be publicly available for review. I just wanted to comment on how regulatory structures don't always serve to keep the little guy out - often, they're simply more binding on the big guys.
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Same thing applies to your residence. Municipal governments purchase the IBC code (2012 Full Set $556.00 [iccsafe.org]), the NFPA code (2008 edition $82.00 [nfpa.org]), the NEC code (2008 edition plus CD $182.25 [nfpa.org]), et cetera, ad nauseum. There is *one* copy of each codebook available in a library somewhere, and no, you may not check it out - it has to stay available for anyone to look at in ord
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Oh, and also, seriously? A small corporation that can't afford the $100 to buy a technical standard? Or the $1000 to buy 10?
Even a 1 person corporation can usually afford that, if they can afford to start a business
That's not the point; the point is that citizens of a free nation do not have to pay a fee to know the laws they are expected to follow.
If it the law... (Score:3)
Then we paid for it through our taxes. There is no sane argument to make citizens pay for it again. If the government contracted out the regulation to a private body, then the government should have paid for it and made it free to access for its citizens. If a private body offered to do it for free so that it could influence the nature of that body or regulations, then you best believe that they have already paid themselves and there is no sane grounds for them to avoid making those regulation available for the public at no cost. You can't charge people twice for the same thing (though I know that every corporation in the country is desperately looking at ways to do precisely that.)
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You can't charge people twice for the same thing
That's exactly what royalties are all about. Corporations do their darnedest to be in a position to collect royalties and to avoid paying them.
Your normal wage slave digs a ditch and gets paid once for it. A smart person creates something that can pay them over and over again. If you're not very creative, buy real estate and rent it to other people.
As far as this topic goes, this is just government being lazy. Rather than create their own working standards, or buy the rights to someone else's wo
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Why not? The Obama administration would like to raise the estate tax (death tax), tax on dividends, etc.
You've already paid taxes on the things you own, and when you die, they tax your family so much, they may not be able to own the things you left for them.
Why should your family have a right to inherit? You did not choose your parents. Whether you have wealthy parents to inherit is a crapshoot.
The egalitarian approach would be to have a 100% inheritance tax, so only those willing to pay the actual value to obtain something of sentimental value will inherit it..
Then auction off the rest, and use the money to provide all children with good living standards, education and healthcare.
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Money is taxed each time it changes hands. I pay income tax on money I acquire. If I then hire someone to work for me, they pay income tax on the money they acquire from me.
Under your logic all taxation would be impossible because any given money (except maybe that being spent directly by the government) has already been taxed at least once.
So if I pay taxes on money I acquire, then later I die and my children acquire the money, they pay taxes on it. This is consistent with the way the government works.
Copyright, Maybe (Score:2)
They perhaps should have copyright protection (as, for example, GPL software does), but should have to be distributed under a suitable "copyleft" license.
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No no, if it's the law of the land it must be public domain. Nothing is more clearly public domain than the law.
What about updates? (Score:2)
Standards and regulations are updated on a regular basis by their issuing authorities. If Public.Resource.Org releases these into the wild, then they will be updated, by inserting a single comma, and reissued. This will invalidate the previous versions and force the purchase of a new set.
It's a good racket.
Building Codes (Score:2)
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Make a public records request for the book. If the copying fees are substantial, make sure to request to inspect, rather than receive copies, of the book.
In states that have public records laws, the code enforement officer's library is your library, so long as the material documents the 'operations' of the public office. Any code that is referenced by the building code pretty much automatically documents the enforement operations of the office, and is fair game with reasonable notice. In the state where
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A Solution! (Score:2)
Replace that pricey, stick-in-the-mud 'ASTM D 3559A' that some 4-eyes loser at the EPA wants you to use with the new American Chemistry Council "Eh, it looks clean to me, what're you so worried about?" testing solution!
Don't bother with boring old 'FAO Nutrition Meeting Report Series, No.
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Do keep in mind that for anyone in industry, this documentation does not cost a bundle. The average cost of the documentation they purchased is about $100 each. Cheaper than a textbook.
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for anyone in industry
Not everyone is already in industry; some are joining industry for the first time.
this documentation does not cost a bundle. The average cost of the documentation they purchased is about $100 each. Cheaper than a textbook.
And like textbooks, the documentation is often updated into expensive new editions. For how many years does the documentation remain valid?
National Standards (Score:2)
Perhaps we need a National Bureau of Standards who keep all the standards, and local governments just pick from the relevant ones? That department would keep a web site, and local goverments could publi
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I assume what the article is taking about is that building codes and the like are made into law, but those codes are not actually written into the law, but included by reference. To me this is a quibble. No one is
Contradictory court ruling (Score:3)
These two sentences come from the first paragraph of the court ruling:
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. As model codes, however, the organization's works retain their protected status.
That obviously contradicts itself. The same text cannot be both public domain and protected at the same time. Why do we have judges who think it is acceptable to issue blatantly contradictory rulings?
Re:Contradictory court ruling (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily. A public domain work can be taken, possibly edited in slight ways, formatted and reprinted, and the new publisher can put a copyright on it. Now maybe their changes aren't enough for the copyright notice to be enforceable, but in some cases I suspect they would be.
In this case, the model code, as written by the SmartCode Association (or some other group), is privately owned. However, as implemented some parts of the code are modified, it's reformatted, and the name is changed. The new version published as law should/must be public domain. (When this is not the case, courts should force it open.) However, the original version, which differs slightly from the law version (including a different name - SmartCode 1.0 instead of The Laws of the City of Fairfax, for example) can retain its copyright.
Of course, if some other city wants to implement the same code, they don't have to go back to the private source. They can look at the law of the city that already bought it, and copy their public-domain law. The private source should have no right of recourse in this case (and if they do, the courts should correct this.)
ignorance of the law (Score:4, Insightful)
So in the US, ignorance of the law is not a legal defence, however you need to spend money to find out what the law says?
wow.
related to LexisNexis issue? (Score:2)
I went through this, it wasn't a big deal (Score:3)
Having started a company to invent and engineer something, I took it upon myself to figure that maybe there might be safety laws for me to follow. With a lot of research, I discovered that in Canada, my device needed to meet radiation and electrical and electrical safety standards.
I read the public laws only to find that the law said "it must meet the specifications found in CSA document 165a" or some equivalently worded reference. And, of course, that CSA document wasn't free. I said hell no, I'm not paying anything to see my laws. They told me to go to a library. Turns out the libraries only have the old obsolete versions. I said hell no again.
In the end, we bot hgot what we wanted. CSA let me into their local offices, and to their "library" where they had the document waiting for me, with a paper and pen to take notes. Sixty pages of document and three pages of notes later, I was done and happy.
So anyone stuck in this scenario, that's the easy way through that I found.
Re:Wikileaks (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. They should have kept the purchase quiet and leaked it. Worst case scenario, imagine the hilarity of the US government scrambling to keep it's own laws secret.
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Just in case you happen to have a lab with all the necessary equipment (properly calibrated, of course), and the properly trained personnel to use the equipment and analyse the results, and ready access to the things you are willing to destroy by testing, but are too cheap to purchase a copy of the spec.
To know what equipment is necessary (Score:3)
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Why should the rest of us pay (with our taxes) so the manufacturers can have a free copy of the standard? Who benefits?
Members of the public who buy bicycle helmets benefit.
If the standard mandates use of a material with certain characteristics is it the governmnents job to provide a supplier of that material? Is it the governments job to provide a manufacturing facility? Trained engineers?
It's the government's job to define a suitable supplier of the material, manufacturing facility, or trained engineers, if such definition is deemed necessary for products sold in a given country.
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Offering it for sale in the US is.
How, then, can I make a new bicycle helmet and compete? Oh right, by buying a specification that was likely developed by one of my competitors so that they can profit from everyone else's work.
Why should the rest of us pay (with our taxes) so the manufacturers can have a free copy of the standard?
Why should the manufacturer pay? Why can't the law just say "A bicycle helment must be made of X and be shaped like Y and resist impacts up to Z mph" instead of "buy the standard
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>Why should the manufacturer pay? Why can't the law just say "A bicycle helment must be made of X and be shaped like Y and resist impacts up to Z mph" instead of "buy the standard for $2750"?
Easy if the law was that explicit the law would have to be rewritten every time we decided the standard needs to change. By referencing a current ANSI standard the law gets updated automatically when a new standard becomes the norm.
Re:Just to clarify... (Score:4, Interesting)
Forget bike helmets. Try the National Electric Code or NFP 101 (fire life safety code). Both are a part of pretty much every building code in America, and both cost a fair chunk of change to get a copy of. Officially, it's a copyright violation to reproduce either one on the web.
A few years ago, some city or county somewhere got into a fight for this very reason. They posted the relevant code to their website, and got hit by a DMCA takedown notice. They fought back by arguing that the state constitution required public dissemination of all laws, and noted that the code's inclusion by reference was in fact mandated by the state legislature. I believe they ended up with a license to make it available on their website, behind a ghetto-fabulous paywall (of sorts) intended to restrict access to only citizens of the town, contractors licensed to do business there, and people with a bona-fide building permit in the municipality.
NEC is available online for free (Score:4, Informative)
You can view the National Electric Code for free by going to http://www.nfpa.org/aboutthecodes/AboutTheCodes.asp?DocNum=70# [nfpa.org] and then going down to"view the document online" and clicking the link, then sign in. If you don't have a username/passwd then you can register for free.
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What makes you think these things have been paid for (in full) with taxes?
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well if uncle sam didn't cut the check.. then easier than playing seven ways to bacon i'm sure we can find a check from uncle sam to the company that cut the check for the standard..
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I suspect if their only goal was the get a copy of these standards and release them on wikileaks or bittorrent, they could have found an illegitimate copy to pass on, and they wouldn't have talked publicly about it.
I think instead that they want to host and distribute copies of these laws to anyone who asks, with the expectation that they could grow their portfolio until all laws in the country are free. If they fold into bankruptcy immediately, then the new company would have to start by buying the same s