The Electronic Frontier Foundation beats back an assault on a bastion of freedom… knowledge of the law:
A federal appeals court today ruled that industry groups cannot control publication of binding laws and standards. This decision protects the work of Public.Resource.org (PRO), a nonprofit organization that works to improve access to government documents. …
Six large industry groups that work on building and product safety, energy efficiency, and educational testing filed suit against PRO in 2013. These groups publish thousands of standards that are developed by industry and government employees. Some of those standards are incorporated into federal and state regulations, becoming binding law. As part of helping the public access the law, PRO posts those binding standards on its website. The industry groups, known as standards development organizations, accused PRO of copyright and trademark infringement for posting those standards online. In effect, they claimed the right to decide who can copy, share, and speak the law. The federal district court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the standards organizations in 2017, and ordered PRO not to post the standards.
EFF notes this rejection of a lower court decision came under the fair use doctrine, and is not final because the lower court was instructed to reconsider keeping fair use in mind.
So far as I’m concerned, since the law cannot be obeyed if it’s not known, it is automatically in the public domain. It’s silly madness to suggest that any organization cannot publish a faithful reproduction of current law for the use of the public, just because of substantial contributions from an organization.
Ideally, laws are made to benefit the public, individually and as a whole. If the industry in question is developing these standards, which subsequently become law, they are benefiting from these standards through the age-old mechanisms of developing public trust in their products, reassuring the public that minimum standards of safety and efficacy have been met. Trying to control the publishing rights is little more than bare-teeth greed.
