The United States Office of the Register has opened up a public comment period relating to the growing problem of "Incorporation by reference." Basically what is going on is various levels of government [local, state or federal] are saying that the People are required by law to follow certain standards or codified practices authored by 3rd parties but are not giving the People free access to this content.

So if you want to build a birdhouse, but your state requires you follow the International Institute on Aviary Husbandry's Standards of Birdhouse Construction [this is a theoretical example]. You must gain access to that content in full unabridged format to follow the law. Your options right now are to buy a physical copy from the IIAH, or to buy a subscription to a website that has that text behind a pay-wall.

In sort: We're being required to follow the law, but we must pay some random 3rd party for the privilege of doing so. How much you have to pay depends on the text involved. It can be trivial, or it could cost you thousands of dollars. You can read about this here.

However the USOR's public comment period will close in something like eight days from now so there's not much time left to get your comment in.

What the hell? How did anyone possibly think this was a good idea?

Also: copyright libraries are vital resources for combating this kind of dickery.

Well considering that the publishing industry & the banking industry is one and the same it's not so surprising. Its just another way for wallstreet to get a deathgrip on more of the Peoples' money.

I.e. Any college student knows McGraw-Hil from being put over a barrel every semester while buying their textbooks. McGraw-Hil is the same company that owns & runs the S&P [you know, that credit agency that slanders people by their "opinions" on how credit worthy people & world governments are without doing any checking into the reliability of their sources!?].

College student's here don't know shit about McGraw-Hill since the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 replaced the British Copyright Act 1911 and their new version (the Legal Deposit Libraries Act 2003) still mentions Irish libraries so anything published in the UK and Ireland is legally required to be submitted to the listed libraries and thus made available to students.

The US Library of Congress has similar rights, but doesn't require the retention of all published works (boooo!).

Since education is considered fair use our schools could simply photocopy a chapter from one book, a chapter from another book and "make" a text for each class at no expense to the students.

But since our schools are in the publishing industry themselves & often require the faculty publish every so often as part of their employment terms, they have no reason to give anyone a break. On the contrary now they're teaming up with publishers to make special editions specific to their school so that the book is 100% valueless by the end of the semester. No one else will use the same book, and they'll make a slightly different one next semester [i.e. different questions in it], so it becomes a $150 bound set of toilet paper.

I'm stealing "dickery", thank you!

Over the years, several professors have told me that they wished to use inexpensive books as texts for their classes, but they were strong-armed by their Department Heads into using the most expensive ones because "we have a contract with them".

That ranks right up there with the professor who use a book they wrote themselves as the required text.

I've had that happen regularly actually.

I've also had a lecturer whose entire course was "tell me how great my PhD of ten years ago is".

This summer, roast some hickory dickery!




On the text book issue, this is possibly the best use for e-book readers.

I must admit that I haven't looked into this, but - to me - it looks like this is about international standards such as maintained by ISO (which costs money, hence the price). These standards describe the requirements all kinds of devices (and other things as well; it's about quality in a very broad sense) must meet. Medical devices must for example meet specific requirements (safety etc.) Adherence to the standards is - at least in some cases - necessary to gain market approval, such as the European CE (Conformité Européene) mark for (medical) devices. These standards are for (new and existing) companies.

I have never heard of standards for things a bird houses, although I can imagine that there might be standards for building or expanding a home. In the last case, it might even be a good idea to have such requirements to safeguard a healthy environment that doesn't collapse. But I think house designer who makes the plans or the construction company that builds it is required to adhere to the codes, not the person. In the birdhouse example, it would be insane if there were such codes (unless we're talking about some big aviary). I have never heard about codes or standards that you have to follow as a citizen that you have to pay for to know.

For companies it might be inconvenient or it might seem unfair that they have to pay for the standards, but otherwise all governments should make those codes themselves. That is costly and needs to be paid for as well, and which might hinder trade because many codes are international standards.

But this is all if it's indeed about standards like ISO standards.

The bird house example was theoretical, it doesn't exist as far as I know.

These things do indeed effect normal everyday citizens not just manufacturers and corporations. Anyone who has wanted to build their own house in PA must, per state law, follow international building code. You can't do that without buying the giant book on what "is" code.

Suppose you bought a rural plot in some woods or the countryside and built a cabin. If you decided to live in it, try to receive mail there, or hook it up to the grid you'd be in violation of state law and risk having the structure razed, fines, and prison time. That's why so much of the so-called "tinyhouse" sustainable living movement builds off of trailers, because in states like these they can't pull it off as real permanent structures.

Yet other states have building codes built into their laws, so that one does not need to pay some private 3rd party for the privilege of following the law. It works just fine and has for generations.

In the case of housing rules you could just make the code into a law, freely accessible for everybody. But I still think that if you build a house, you or the people designing/building it for you, do need to know the safety requirements etc. And if they are in the standards, fine. For most people, these costs will be covered by the designers/builders anyway as they don't design and build themselves.

I still think that most people will never have to pay to get access to these codes, as most are aimed at companies and devices. And I'm am quite happy that (medical) devices are subject to standards, such as safety or accuracy (so that, for example, EEG procedures are safe for both doctor and patients and the recorded signal is correctly being displayed). Keeps us safe, and makes life easier. For example, there are also standards about the accuracy of scales - and if I have to pay for a kilo of apples I like to get an actual kilo.

New York State makes building codes available online. There are also Town building codes that vary throughout NYS, and public libraries have been traditional depositories for these codes (published in volumes), which the public can consult for free.

I wasn't aware that there are states that make access to these codes a difficulty. I should think that, regardless of the expense of purchasing these codes, libraries would insure having the codes in their collections (including the regular updates, which we receive at our own library).

-- Nephele

Many of those types of standards are paid for by the taxpayers using grants, so by using the flag of intellectual property rights to force people to spend thousands of dollars to view the material these 3rd parties are essentially double dipping.

We as a country realize the benefits to medical and biological research, so we use tax dollars to help fund studies & the publication of studies in these fields. Years back [when congress still cared about the average citizen] congress passed a law that these types of tax payer funded medical studies be freely accessible to the public [who paid for them] and that's why there are so many online.

But we haven't applied that same foresight to other types of tax payer funded research, like many of these safety codes. Or research studies in other fields. The publishing industry, the bigger players of which are some of the biggest & baddest wallstreet banks, have learned that if they take as much of this tax payer funded content as they can get away with, and put it behind a pay-wall, they'll rake in millions of dollars from citizens who should have free access to the information to begin with. JSTOR for example blocks more than 150,000,000 attempts to access articles behind their pay-wall per year.

And it's only getting worse now that the states are broke, and the feds are pulling research funding in order to help cover the budget shortfalls generated by all the tax cuts for the rich that we've enabled in the last thirty years. Up until the early 1970s most of our scientific research programs at universities were funded almost entirely by the Department of Defense. The idea at the time was that the technological and scientific advances paid for in this manner would in return benefit the whole of society including military applications. Chomsky was talking about this recently at Boston [the lecture can be found on youtube], and remarked that something like ninety percent of MIT was Pentagon funded at one time, and that when the funding started disappearing it was replaced with big corporate & banking contracts which were using our best scientific facilities not to create the breakthroughs for the next fifty years like the government had been, but instead for short term big yield [profit] gains including things incredibly bad for society like computerized logarithm manipulation of the stock market. This has gotten so out of hand that these students have to sign oaths of silence to their corporate overlords and cannot even answer questions on school tests without risking litigation over breech of contract.

It goes without saying that the real fruits of this private funding sources: that is to say the information it is producing, will be even less freely & easily accessible to the public than the publicly funded variety. Think we won't have to pay for it? Think again: any time that information is needed by the public or the government, it will be to the tune of thousands of dollars with scary warning labels on the books explaining all the terrible things the system will do to you if you dare try to show the content to someone else without them paying for the privilege.

-- Tue Mar 27, 2012 4:22 pm --



That's how it should be done, I think. If the law can't provide the information it is referring to, it [the law] shouldn't exist.