General > General Technical Chat
Harmonised technical standards to be publicly available in EU
NiHaoMike:
--- Quote from: coppice on March 05, 2024, 10:58:28 pm ---I think its important that standards have tight copyright control. The last thing we want is people pushing out all sorts of doctored copies of these documents that can't be trusted. No copyright means no control.
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Cryptographically sign the documents. It's a long solved problem.
rogerggbr:
--- Quote from: 5U4GB on March 06, 2024, 09:59:18 am ---... Even the standards committee members, the people whose unpaid labour created the standard, often don't have access to the final thing.
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Having once been on a committee, that sent a representative to BSI, in turn sending a representative to IEC, I can say that most of those writing and editing standards are paid (as I was then). They all work for companies that have an interest in the standard. There may of course be exceptions, but of the ones I was involved with it was mainly very large companies sponsoring their top brains to go to these meetings and contribute accordingly. All the folks I met were doing it for the right reasons - make it better, but I am sure you can find exceptions.
The costs charged by national standards bodies were representative of a time where controlling and printing were not insignificant, so they charged. A lot. I don't buy many standards now and am no longer a member of BSI so can not get the discount. I have said this before but if you need to review or learn about a particular standard go to your local university library where they likely have unlimited access.
coppice:
--- Quote from: rogerggbr on March 06, 2024, 03:10:52 pm ---
--- Quote from: 5U4GB on March 06, 2024, 09:59:18 am ---... Even the standards committee members, the people whose unpaid labour created the standard, often don't have access to the final thing.
--- End quote ---
Having once been on a committee, that sent a representative to BSI, in turn sending a representative to IEC, I can say that most of those writing and editing standards are paid (as I was then). They all work for companies that have an interest in the standard. There may of course be exceptions, but of the ones I was involved with it was mainly very large companies sponsoring their top brains to go to these meetings and contribute accordingly. All the folks I met were doing it for the right reasons - make it better, but I am sure you can find exceptions.
The costs charged by national standards bodies were representative of a time where controlling and printing were not insignificant, so they charged. A lot. I don't buy many standards now and am no longer a member of BSI so can not get the discount. I have said this before but if you need to review or learn about a particular standard go to your local university library where they likely have unlimited access.
--- End quote ---
Its normal for the people who develop standards to be paid by their employers. Those employers also pay heavy fees to be members of the standards body. The standards body merely has to do some admin, and distribution of the documents. That used to be a substantial publishing job, but its now just making PDFs available from a web site. Their costs have gone way down. The prices of those documents haven't. Some bodies, like the ITU, faced up to this some time ago, and made all their specs available for free download. Most haven't.
TimFox:
--- Quote from: kosine on March 06, 2024, 11:24:30 am ---British Standards (and possibly others) have always been publicly available for free at your local library. The caveat is/was that they arrived on microfiche so you couldn't copy them. Nothing to stop you writing down all the important bits, though. (Not sure how the system works these days. Does anyone even still use microfiche?)
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I don’t know the current status of microfiche and microfilm in public libraries, but in my student days the library fiche and film readers had photocopy built in, with page payment charges comparable to regular photocopies.
Zero999:
--- Quote from: coppice on March 06, 2024, 11:25:06 am ---
--- Quote from: tom66 on March 06, 2024, 11:17:59 am ---
--- Quote from: coppice on March 06, 2024, 11:16:14 am ---
--- Quote from: 5U4GB on March 06, 2024, 10:00:39 am ---
--- Quote from: coppice on March 05, 2024, 10:58:28 pm ---I think its important that standards have tight copyright control. The last thing we want is people pushing out all sorts of doctored copies of these documents that can't be trusted. No copyright means no control.
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This is standard excuse #1 from organisations like ISO.
As an argument it's about as persuasive as "everyone should learn latin because it structures the mind".
--- End quote ---
What a bogus argument. We have to comply with standards, or there are legal consequences. If you can't have some trust that the document you are using is an accurate copy of the current in force revision of the standard, how can you ever verify compliance? Do you want the country's laws subject to people tampering with the content without consequence? I'll add "this does not apply to coppice" to all of them, and make sure those revisions get widely distributed.
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How does that prevent iso.org from releasing official standards for free? If you want to be really cautious about it, they could even digitally sign the documents with their key so you can be certain the document is from ISO and not anyone else.
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There might be a reasonable way of replacing copyright control with something like that, but one way or another you need to be able to trust the documents you are trying to comply with are genuine.
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Just only download from the ISO, or whatever, website and you know it's genuine, assuming the site hasn't been compromised of course. Problem solved.
Standards being behind a paywall is more of a problem because people are incentivised to obtain pirate copies, which might be, incomplete, outdated and have the dates changed to appear to be up to date.
And as I hinted at before, content can be distributed feely and still be under strict copyright. For example, Dave puts his videos on YouTube and allows millions to watch them for free, but he still owns the copyright. If someone started uploading them to their own channel or website, when I'm sure he would pursue them for copyright violation.
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