Rogue archivist Carl Malamud has been fighting to publish the building and safety codes that have been incorporated into the law, but which you have to pay to see. He's published thousands and thousands of pages' worth of safety codes, and is being sued by some of the standards bodies. Now, he writes: "An announcement from Joe Bhatia, the leader of the American National Standards Institute, says 'A standard that has been incorporated by reference does have the force of law, and it should be available.'"
The release continues: IBR standards hosted on the portal are available exclusively as read-only files. In order to protect the intellectual property rights of the groups holding these standards' copyrights, the portal has built in security features that prevent users from printing, downloading, or transferring any of the posted standards; in addition, screenshots will be disabled and the standards will contain an identifying watermark. Please note that registration is for a single browsing session. Users who return to the site in another session or on another day will need to fill out the registration form again.
Public.Resource.Org is grateful for the shout-out in this press release (we're "some have called"). Our position on this matter remains unchanged. We leave you with a prayer for our democracy: This law is your law. ASCII to ASCII, disk to disk. Data thou art and data thou shalt become.
ANSI Launches Online Portal for Standards Incorporated by Reference
(Thanks, Carl!)
