[HN Gopher] EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be fre...
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EU Advocate General: Technical Standards must be freely available
without charge
Author : layer8
Score : 306 points
Date : 2023-06-23 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (curia.europa.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (curia.europa.eu)
| javajosh wrote:
| It's so strange when a government agency seems to actually
| advocate for people rather than for special interests.
| negative_zero wrote:
| FYI for all: the cheapest source of standards available in
| English (that I have found) is the Estonian Centre for
| Standardisation and Accreditation: https://www.evs.ee/en
|
| Prices are generally single to low double-digit Euros (even for
| standards that are hundreds or 1000+ dollars).
|
| If you are a solo contractor like me (and hence only need one
| copy), DON'T get the single licence copies. You need to use some
| BS DRM software that binds the file to your computer and is a
| PITA.
|
| Get the organisation one, pay for two licenses, and you'll be
| given a regular PDF instead (and still save hundreds of dollars).
|
| You obviously will only get the Estonian specific annexes, but
| those are normally optional anyway, and generally available for
| free when downloading the "free sample" of a standard for a
| specific country.
| miga wrote:
| The standards are often referred to by the law and public
| institutions.
|
| This means that they become de facto law, even if they do not
| adhere to fundamental principles of the law: transparency, and
| fairness.
|
| Standard paywalls thus should be seen as a barrier for the rule
| of law, not just barrier for innovation.
|
| The prices for access to standards made sense in the era, when
| every document had to be printed instead of downloading as PDF.
| olieidel wrote:
| This is very interesting. One data point for this are the
| standards for medical device compliance (e.g. for medical
| software). You can buy them from different institutions, the
| content is the same, but the price varies from anywhere between
| 30EUR to 500EUR. Yep, for a PDF file. It's an unholy mess and
| literally every person I've encountered in the system, even
| auditors, think that it's ridiculous.
|
| The PDF-selling companies argue that they need that money to
| organize committee meetings for developing further versions of
| standards etc., but that leaves me wondering - we have so many
| other standards-setting institutions which don't rely on shady
| PDF sales, so why not take that model instead?
|
| [1] https://openregulatory.com/accessing-standards/ (Disclaimer:
| My company)
| jtwaleson wrote:
| Don't forget the mandatory mention of evs.ee where you can buy
| standards way cheaper thanks to the Estonian government.
| jaybeavers wrote:
| Thank you from someone begrudgingly paying thousands of Euros
| for IEC medical device standards pdfs!!!!
| immibis wrote:
| Most standards organizations have SOME way of making money,
| because we live in capitalism. Some of them take hefty fees for
| membership; some of them take hefty fees for compliance
| certification; some of them take hefty fees to use their
| trademarks (as in putting the USB logo next to the USB port);
| and some of them take hefty fees to see the standards.
| robomartin wrote:
| > because we live in capitalism
|
| No. Because it costs money to run these organizations. They
| are either funded by the government (which means taxes, which
| means us), membership fees or other activities. Last I
| checked everyone needs to feed themselves or their family.
| This "it's because it's capitalism" thing gets old pretty
| quickly.
|
| What should be objectionable is precisely when organizations
| are government (taxes, us) funded and they sell us standards
| you are supposed to work and test against for, well,
| government-mandated certification requirements. So...we pay
| for their work through taxation...for them to sell us the
| products they create...and then we pay for the testing
| services against documents we cannot freely access even
| though we paid for their development. That's just messed-up.
|
| This is where it gets complicated. If USA or European
| taxpayers fund the development of these standards, should
| others outside of those regions have to pay or contribute in
| any way? China is no-longer a poor agrarian society. And yet
| they benefit from work done in the EU and USA for decades at
| great cost to taxpayers.
|
| Not sure what the answer to this is other than to point out
| these things are not simple. There's the "well, it benefits
| everyone" angle, which brings us back to "Why are these
| organizations charging for PDF's at all?".
| themitigating wrote:
| :No. Because it costs money to run these organizations.
| They are either funded by the government (which means
| taxes, which means us), membership fees or other
| activities. Last I checked everyone needs to feed
| themselves or their family. This "it's because it's
| capitalism" thing gets old pretty quickly.
|
| What's the difference? What you described is capitalism.
| tialaramex wrote:
| It's true that this costs money, but it doesn't cost _that_
| much money.
|
| The EU or US _could_ just decide to pay for it. I would guess
| that this is politically easier to swallow in Europe even
| though it makes as much if not more sense economically in the
| US.
| anotherhue wrote:
| Secret laws are generally considered bad.
|
| It's going to be for something dumb like the exact dimensions of
| a fire safety tag, but if you don't tell me the law then it's a
| secret law.
| miga wrote:
| I think "bad" is understatement: the secrecy of the law
| undermines the principle of transparency that makes law work.
| layer8 wrote:
| The standards are not secret, they are merely behind a paywall.
| The assumption has always been that the companies who have to
| (or want to) implement those standards can afford the expense.
| However, one point addressed by the Advocate General's present
| Opinion is that it should be possible for citizens to check
| whether the relevant standards are being obeyed, which means
| that _citizens_ need to have access to those standards, not
| just the entities implementing the standards. In addition, an
| important part of the current court case is about whether
| copyright (the basis on which fees are charged) can apply to
| standards that are effectively part of the law.
| amelius wrote:
| I always wondered why they weren't for technical _safety_
| standards.
|
| By the way, there should be a special place in hell for the
| people who designed this EU standards website:
|
| https://standards.cencenelec.eu
|
| You can search for standards, then you can pay for them in a
| webshop, but you can't link to the main page for each standard as
| there is some kind of URL-cookie mechanism that works hand-in-
| hand with state on the server that will break down as soon as you
| start using the URLs elsewhere.
| diogocp wrote:
| The submission title is misleading. This is an opinion of an
| Advocate General, not a decision of the court.
|
| > The Advocate General's Opinion is not binding on the Court of
| Justice. It is the role of the Advocates General to propose to
| the Court, in complete independence, a legal solution to the
| cases for which they are responsible. The Judges of the Court are
| now beginning their deliberations in this case. Judgment will be
| given at a later date.
| layer8 wrote:
| I now updated the title. It's not a decision of the Court, but
| the Advocates General are part of the Court, along with the
| judges, and their opinion is followed in most cases.
| SNosTrAnDbLe wrote:
| I realized this once when I went down the rabbit hole of SQL
| standards.
|
| ISO SQL standard - 187 CHF
| https://www.iso.org/standard/76583.html
|
| ANSI SQL standard - 237 USD for non members
| https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/iso/isoiec90752016
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Yeah, sux to not have the SQL standard. Flipside, allegedly it
| is nearly undecipherable (on hearsay, not IME)
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Flipside, allegedly it is nearly undecipherable
|
| It's readable - though obviously you're going to need
| experience in RDBMS theory (Codd's paper, etc) to grok it.
|
| It is _very_ verbose, though.
|
| Fortunately, the only people who need the ISO SQL spec are
| the vendors: the people writing SQL engines and tooling: it's
| next-to-useless for people who are designing databases or
| writing queries against them, chiefly because no RDBMS
| implementation, ever, has come close to implementing the full
| specification, and everyone has their own extensions to SQL -
| so all the vendors put out their own documentation and the
| world's largely been happy with that for the past ~40 years
| that SQL's been relevant.
|
| It's not too hard to find the standards in PDF form if you
| know where to look - and as someone who does a fair bit of
| SQL, I'll say I've only ever referred to the standards to
| back-up my more controversial posts on StackOverflow.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| I'm heading in the direction which is engines/tooling and
| I'm amazed at the number of corners of SQL that I have
| discovered that I don't know properly. You can use it fine
| for decades but when you need to know _precisely_ what is
| acceptable to the GROUP BY /HAVING clauseS... then you
| suddenly realise you don't. It's quite surprising.
|
| it would be useful to have that standard. Thanks, will have
| a hunt.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Are you at-least familiar with the concept of relational-
| division?
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Very. Why?
| mozman wrote:
| People want to get paid for their work, and we need rigorous
| authors and vetting. Who will pay?
| codedokode wrote:
| Should we make ordinary laws also paid? The lawyers earn
| ridiculous profits so it is only fair that they share some of
| it with law authors.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I've always been a fan of the model followed by Khronos for
| their graphics standards. The documentation is open to
| everyone, while companies pay for participation and compliance
| certification.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Commercial enterprises could pay a licensing/verification fee
| that gets split between the spec authors and third party
| verifiers.
|
| After all, isn't the entire value of a spec in the verification
| that it is correctly implemented?
| layer8 wrote:
| The Opinion argues that those affected by the standards, for
| example citizens buying products subject to the standards,
| should be able to know what those standards are, and at least
| in principle be enabled to verify if the standards are met.
| Requiring third-party verifiers would be a way to deny
| ordinary citizens free access to the standards.
| dwheeler wrote:
| The people who will pay will be the same people who currently
| pay.The authors of standards are usually not paid by the
| standards bodies and get no royalties. They and their companies
| even have to pay for the travel required. The technical
| reviewers are also often not paid by the standards bodies.
|
| The purpose of the current system is to defray the costs of the
| printing press, since there was no other way to disseminate
| information 100 years ago. Now that we have the Internet,
| paying for individual standards is unjustifiable and should be
| ended. This is made worse because of the increasing number of
| standards that effect anything useful. Countless problems have
| happened because people cannot affordably access the hundreds
| of standards they are supposed to be using.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| Yes, but the lawmakers are the ones that should abstain from
| referencing closed standards in the law, not the standard the one
| that has to open itself because the law references it.
|
| Or maybe the law could create its own official standard that
| simply paraphrases what the closed standard says, effectively
| making it open.
| csense wrote:
| I figure this should be a straightforward case of eminent
| domain.
|
| Say you own a house. The government needs to take your house to
| demolish it to build a road. The government is within its
| rights to just _take_ it (after due process and fair payment).
|
| Now say you own a document that you make people pay to read.
| The government needs to take your document to make it part of
| the law to build a building code. Why doesn't the government
| exercise same kind of rights to just _take_ it (after due
| process and fair payment)?
| jstanley wrote:
| > The government needs to take your document to make it part
| of the law to build a building code.
|
| This part doesn't follow.
|
| Why doesn't the government make their own document? Eminent
| domain exists for land because it's not possible to make more
| land in the same place.
| immibis wrote:
| Historically, the government doesn't pay fairly. The market
| value of a house that's in the way of a highway is *very
| low*.
| rat9988 wrote:
| Because nobody will make the effort afterwards to make good
| standards. Fair payment is in most countries quiet unfair in
| fact.
| layer8 wrote:
| The first option would mean that the law couldn't, for example,
| mandate the use of ISO time formats.
|
| The second option would mean they would still get sued by the
| copyright holders of the closed standards, paraphrase or not.
|
| The better option is probably for the government to re-publish
| the standards as-is, with some compensation for the copyright
| holders.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The government could give itself immunity from such lawsuits.
| But agreed, there should be a set compensation for use of
| standards in law which in doing so makes them openly and
| freely available. Unless the copyright holder is Elsevier, in
| that case they get nothing - screw you Elsevier.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| On most cases law doesn't cite a specific standard however
| refers to the "state of the art" which then is commonly
| interpreted as "as defined in a standard" It is possible (but
| often impractical) to prove to be "state the art" without
| following a standard.
|
| Purpose is that the government doesn't have to rule all
| details, but can leave that to domain experts and ongoing
| research.
| gerdesj wrote:
| ISO 9000 + 14000 + 21000 (Quality, Enviro, IS Security) cost a
| bloody fortune for a small business and they get updated every
| few years. That lot is nearly compulsory in some markets.
|
| You still have to shell out for at least a day per standard per
| year for auditing but it would be nice if the standards
| themselves were free. Every little helps as Mr Tesco is fond of
| saying.
|
| (EDIT - speling)
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| It's time for a ruling like this to apply to construction related
| codes. You need code books such as IBC, IRC, IECC, NFPA, ANSI in
| multiple year editions (depending on jurisdiction) and then whole
| new batches of books when jurisdictions adopt new codes.
|
| Then, the IBC allows you to claim fire ratings if you match an
| Underwriter's Laboratory tested assembly (for example, a fire-
| rated wall) which buying PDFs from UL is another additional
| expense.
|
| Point being, there's a rabbit hole of paywalled technical
| standards in construction.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| [PDF]
| soulbadguy wrote:
| of course they should be. The fact there aren't currently, and we
| need to even discuss it is so strange. I am happy that EU exists
| and is forcing some sanity in the tech world.
| westurner wrote:
| IIUC this means that EU government standards must be public
| domain? Or, preexisting paywalled / committee_attendance_required
| standards are now conveniently by decree public domain?
|
| What are some good examples of Open Standards and Open Web
| Standards for EU and other world regions?
| layer8 wrote:
| ETSI standards, for example, are already freely available. But
| if they reference and normatively rely on ISO standards, it
| might mean that the EU will have to somehow arrange for those
| ISO standards to be made freely available as well.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Public domain content is available without any copyright
| restrictions. While making it available under restrictive
| rules/licenses could be enough to achieve the "no secret laws"
| requirement.
| tgv wrote:
| Public domain (in its normal interpretation) might even have
| adverse effects. It would allow sites/books to publish the
| standards with (un)intentional errors. Copying them as is
| should be free though, IMO.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| Free redistribution without modification, is likely a better
| model
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(page generated 2023-06-23 23:00 UTC)