Federal Court Says Public Safety Laws Can Be Locked Behind Paywalls

I don't know if this is actually being proposed as a possible solution. It might be enough to prevent governments from doing the reference in the first place. Then it would be up to the government to negotiate public access to to any standards they wanted to make law.

There is a commonly used approximation used to compensate for the change in density of various retail petroleum products with temperature. In my country we have a law covering how such compensation is to be done at the retail level. That law is a reference to a standard behind a pay and weirdness wall. In Belgium they have the same sort of law, but the actual function is right there in the law, in standard mathematical notation.

It's actually directly contrary to rulings in other states, circuits, etc.

Even the supreme court has held, consistently, since 1888, that the law is free.

'the authentic exposition and interpretation of the law, which, binding every citizen, is free for publication to all, whether it is a declaration of unwritten law, or an interpretation of a constitution or a statute' Banks v. Manchester (128 U.S. 244, 1888)

I don't think this could be more clear.

An argument that you get to lock it away by incorporating by reference is patently absurd and directly contrary to this.

You don't get to say

"page one of georgia annotated code:

for the text of pages 1-100000 of the georgia code, please see 'the real georgia annotated code', published by forprofitco,"

But that's just what is happening, since these standards are not "voluntary", but binding law that you can be charged with crimes or sued for violating.

If they wanted to charge money, they have a simple solution - don't make them law, don't charge people for violations, etc.

" Frankly, the arguments presented by Resource.org seem to be unpersuasive (the claim that these standards are "discovered facts" is just insulting to the engineers that worked on them) and completely unsupported by the law."

Except they (and others) have repeatedly won in pretty much every other case. This is in fact, the first case i'm aware of that they've lost (or that others have lost in similar situations).

Frankly, the idea that you can sue people or charge them with a crime, for a law they have to pay to read is insulting to everyone, and very clearly not constitutional.

As mentioned, there is a simple solution - if you want to charge, don't give them binding force of law. You don't get to have your cake and eat it too.