Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Corynne McSherry
“Some people just don’t know how to take a hint. For more than a decade, giant standards-development organizations (SDOs) have been fighting in courts around the country, trying use copyright law to control access to other laws. They claim that that they own the copyright in the text of some of the most important regulations in the country – the codes that protect product, building and environmental safety — and that they have the right to control access to those laws. And they keep losing because, it turns out, judges understand that this is an absurd and undemocratic proposition. Their latest defeat came this week, when a district court held that UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes – like the National Electrical Code — can include codes incorporated by reference into law.” (10/16/24)