How to Restrict Access to the Law (and Make Money Doing It!)

Standardization is really important. Huge parts of modern life—everything from sending an email to the structural integrity of your car—depend on standards. Among other things, standards make sure we’re all on the same page. When I say “2017-02-07” you might have some clues about what I mean, but if I tell you that this string of numbers is expressed according to ISO 8601, you’d know for sure that I’m referring to today’s date.

Standardization is so important, in fact, that a large number of standards are made part of the law. On Friday the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia issued an opinion in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org, addressing some hard questions about the extent to which copyright applies to standards, and in particular standards that have the force of law by virtue of their official adoption by regulatory agencies. The court concluded that the standards at issue in that case—a variety of technical and education standards developed by ASTM, APA, and several other groups—are protected by copyright and that their incorporation into binding law through regulations does not affect that copyright-protected status. I find that conclusion troubling.

A Standards Business Model

First, why do organizations like ASTM care? Imagine that you’re developing a new standard and you think you need to make some money to recoup your costs. One way to do that is to charge people who want to use the standard. To make that work you’d probably try to obtain some form of intellectual property protection so that you have leverage when asking for your fee. What kind of IP protection do you want? There might be some ways that you could try to work your standard into something patentable, but patents are expensive and hard to obtain. Another option is copyright. Copyright lasts much longer, is easier to obtain, and has some hefty enforcement provisions (statutory damage awards up to $150,000 per work infringed). So, you go with asserting copyright.

Next, you need to get people using this standard. Of course, voluntary adoption is great. But mandatory compliance is even better. So, you lobby some government agencies to adopt your standard as binding law itself.  That way, anyone who is obligated to follow the law will have to also follow your standard. It’s important, though, that the text of your standard not be reproduced in the regulation itself. Those are generally freely available, but you need to sell the thing. Instead, you aim to get the regulation “incorporated by reference” into the regulation; the regulation says that the public must comply with Standard X and gives a reference to it, but if a member of the public wants to know what Standard X  actually says in order to comply with the law, they’ve got to go buy a copy from you.

Now, I don’t mean to say that incorporation of standards into law is a bad thing or is only done to make money. It isn’t, but the restricting access part of this model seems problematic. It’s also at the core of the business model staked out by ASTM and the other plaintiffs in ASTM v. Public.Resource.Org. Posting free copies of those standards to the web for public access, as Public.Resource.org does, poses a threat to that model.

Should Standards Receive Legal Protection?

First, the business model is premised on copyright protection of standards, but there are persuasive arguments for why standards should be excluded from copyright protection. The text of the Copyright Act is a good place to start. Section 102(b) states specifically that “systems,” among other things, are not protected. That and a variety of other  theories for why copyright protection should not apply were raised in the ASTM case.  This post from TechDirt does a good job working through the copyright-related arguments made by Public.Resource.org. The court rejected them all, but I imagine we will hear more about them on appeal.

Beyond copyright, though, the main reason I find the ASTM decision troubling is that it gives relatively little attention to fundamental questions about due process, the public’s right to access the law, and earlier caselaw on the subject.   Rather than write out my own ideas on this, I’ll leave you with this good quote from the 1980 First Circuit case Bldg. Officials & Code Adm. v. Code Tech., Inc., which outline those concerns and raises some good questions that I hope will be addressed on appeal in the ASTM case:

“[Earlier Supreme Court cases hold that] the public owns the law not just because it usually pays the salaries of those who draft legislation, but also because . . . ‘Each citizen is a ruler, –a law-maker.’ The citizens are the authors of the law, and therefore its owners, regardless of who actually drafts the provisions, because the law derives its authority from the consent of the public, expressed through the democratic process.

Along with this metaphorical concept of citizen authorship, the cases go on to emphasize the very important and practical policy that citizens must have free access to the laws which govern them. This policy is, at bottom, based on the concept of due process. . . . Due process requires people to have notice of what the law requires of them so that they may obey it and avoid its sanctions. . . . But if access to the law is limited, then the people will or may be unable to learn of its requirements and may be thereby deprived of the notice to which due process entitles them. [Defendant] points out that the holder of a copyright has the right to refuse to publish the copyrighted material at all and may prevent anyone else from doing so, thereby preventing any public access to the material. . . . We cannot see how this aspect of copyright protection can be squared with the right of the public to know the law to which it is subject.”