Then you don’t actually have a philosophy.
You just lost your own argument there. Information is not the same as property.
You can’t steal information, because copying doesn’t deprive the copyright owner of their works.[quote=“Karl_Best, post:4, topic:19457”]
Defense contractors manufacture tangible goods, under contract, for the good of society and for which they are well compensated. (Their CEOs make a lot of money too.) Why should copyrighted materials created by standards developing organizations be treated any differently?
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Because they’re different categories. If information were tangible, and could be stolen, then we might be annoyed here. But as it is making a copy of something doesn’t deprive the standards body of anything.
You can go around griping about the poor standards organizations, but we can all see your account is 11 hours old, and you’re just an astroturfer spouting the same tired and wrong talking points as the MPAA and the RIAA.
You’re not welcome here.
And fer the love of Dog, stop trying to equate physical objects with information. It makes you look really, stupid.
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Not true. The constitutional intention of copyright was “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. The mechanism to do this is granting the exclusive rights in copyright. If copyright no longer does what it intends, then the mechanism is broken and needs to be changed.
People these days are always confusing the intention of copyright with the mechanisms employed.
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Gees, LDoBe, a bit full of yourself here today, eh? Not welcome here? Who are you to make that decision? You’re not the BoingBoing administrator, are you? Let the admin make the decision as to who is welcome in this forum. (And while my commenting login is new, I’ve been a daily BB reader for a decade. I have no association at all with the MPAA and RIAA; I don’t like them any more than you do. Please don’t make assertions unless you know for sure.)
We’re not talking about data or even information. We’re talking about copyrighted documents that someone went to great effort and expense to create, and we’re talking about taking those copyrighted documents and distributing them freely without compensation to the owner. In this conversation I see no distinction between a copyrighted document and a physical object. Both are developed/manufactured through a process that incurs cost. Copyright laws exist in order to encourage innovation, to allow the copyright owner to recoup development costs and make a profit as compensation for the developer’s efforts. Just as with any other intellectual work, there will be less (or even zero) incentive to create creative works if there is no opportunity to recoup costs and perhaps make a profit.
Now I’m not at all suggesting that nobody should be allowed to examine a copy of a law or regulation that applies to them without paying. Not at all. The governed should have access to the law. I’ll point out here that many standards organizations make it possible to read their standards without having to pay. For example, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), developers of a large number of fire and safety codes that affect all of us on a daily basis, lets you view their standards – see http://www.nfpa.org/codes-and-standards/free-access. You can buy a copy if you want, but if all you want to do is check to see what some code requirements are then it’s free.
Question: Who do you want to be developing safety standards? A bunch of government bureaucrats, congress critters and attorneys who are all answering to special interests? Do you want these standards to be bought and paid for like so many of our laws? Or would you prefer them being developed under an open, transparent process, with technical experts on safety, building construction, fire, etc. providing input and where everyone (including you!) can review and comment on the drafts?
Now, granted that these technical experts are volunteers acting on their own or on behalf of their employers, and are not being paid by the standards organization for their work. But there needs to be some sort of process and forum under which this activity occurs, which means that we need an organization to run it. There’s a lot more to this than just the committee itself; you need someone to administer the committee, you need someone to organize and host the meetings, provide infrastructure, coordination with other standards organizations, legal oversight, people to prepare the documents for publication, etc. All of these functions require people who want to be paid and have health care. While I like what I do, simple job satisfaction doesn’t pay the rent. There are costs involved, and these costs must be paid. (Tell me, LDoBe, are you given a salary and benefits by your employer? Are you provided an office and equipment?)
Each standards organization operates a bit differently than others, of course, but nearly all of them get revenue from a combination of sales of standards, membership dues, conferences and seminars, etc. Usually revenue from sales is a pretty big chunk of the revenue, so cutting that off would be a significant hit which would cripple the organization’s ability to develop good work. Being non-profits, the standards organizations don’t pay nearly as much as the private sector – including the defense contractors that I previously used as an example. Some of the CEOs make decent money, but they’re also running very complex organizations with hundreds of employees and lots of political issues to manage.
Ultimately the issues of CEO pay and technical expert volunteers working for free, etc. are just red herrings. At issue is whether copyright holders should be allowed to revenue from their work, or if all intangibles should be free. Yes, I’d like if all music were free, but I’d also like something other than crap to listen to, and I’d like my favorite artist to produce a new album every year, which he isn’t going to do if he has a day job. I’d like all of my books to be free, but there too I’d rather not read crap. At some point the musicians and writers need to be paid; they may be fine in the beginning giving away their stuff from free in order to get their careers of the ground, but in the end they need to do this as a job so that they can develop their full time to it. Free standards may work for a while, but not for long, and I’d much rather have safety standards developed by someone who knows what they’re talking about. Take them away and distribute them for free and you won’t have any new ones.
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edit Thursday 8:45am ET: Since I have a new login BB is limited the number of replies I can make on this thread, so I have to edit this one rather than making another reply. So, in reply to LDoBe’s note late Wednesday:
Thanks for your return to civil discourse, LDoBe. Much appreciated.
I agree with your suggestions that government agencies could pay for public access to the standards. I’ve suggested before (in a previous comment to a BB posting on this subject, using a different login 
) that government should, if incorporating a standard into a law, be required to purchase something like a site license so that all citizens can access the law for free.
What we don’t want, though, is undue government influence on the content of the standard. It’s fine for a government agency to say “we need someone to develop a standard on X”, but it’s not so good for them to further say that “it should say Y”. As I said yesterday, that opens the door for lobbyists to dictate even more content of the law.
Actually, there’s already a fair amount of cooperation between standards organizations and government agencies. ANSI (American National Standards Institute, an umbrella organization of standards organizations) has a very strong relationship with NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, a government agency). ANSI is constantly researching areas where new standards are needed, and encouraging the various standards organizations which are its members to develop standards in these areas. For example, ANSI has held workshops on smart cities, nuclear energy, nanotechnology, electric vehicles, etc. to discuss what standards need to be developed in these areas.
As counterpoint to BB’s referencing Public.Resource.Org’s testimony before Congress in the parent article to this comment thread, let me provide a link to ANSI’s testimony: see http://ansi.org/news_publications/news_story.aspx?menuid=7&articleid=3844 Note in this article the reference to ANSI’s organization of a portal where standards which have been incorporated by reference into law may be viewed for free, similar to what NFPA has been doing on their own for several years.
I think that we can all agree that our current copyright system needs a major overhaul. But that doesn’t excuse stealing copyrighted materials in the meantime.
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Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Perhaps we should amend that to mean something more like “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, unless the portions of the law you claim ignorance of cost money to read”? That should preserve the ability of standards-making companies to charge, while freeing average people from getting in trouble for not reading them. Everybody wins, right?
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Firstly, let me apologize for my rant and accusations. I’ve recognized in the past, as I do now, that all too often I write hurtful things on the internet without realizing that I’m talking with another person, not a wall of text. I’m sorry for saying that you aren’t welcome here. That was stupid.
Secondly, thank you so much for your civil reply.
I agree that there’s a problem in that standards organizations needing to pay employees, and I agree there is an expense to developing standards.
What I think should have been done is: The government pays these standards bodies to develop specific standards required by law. In exchange the standards become codified as law and are public domain.
Instead what it appears we have are standards created by private organizations (non-profits are private as well). The law says buildings/gadgets/whatever must comply with these standards. If I want to access a standard required by law, then I shouldn’t be charged for it.
I feel that these standards should have been commissioned, so standards bodies don’t have any exclusivity over the law.
As far as I can see, the physical goods analogy can’t really apply here for at least one reason: If some private company decides to build an aircraft carrier on its own, and the navy commandeers it, pulls up anchor and sails it to war without paying, the shipyard loses all the effort that went into building the ship, plus the ship is gone too. But, if the government decides a standard should be public law and puts the text of the standard in the public domain, the standards organization can still try to sell the standard. All they have to do is just bundle it with other standards not referenced by law. Or sell hard copies of the standard, like how some shops sell copies of the constitution.
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