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SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

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Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#61

Post by [deleted] »

dare944 wrote: post #39
btown wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both can be true. Promoting a standard isn’t free, and having licensing and certification fees, especially in an industry where such practices make a standardization org get taken more seriously, is a reasonable strategy. We’re lucky that our industry moved in a different direction!

IP licensing and certification are entirely separate from access to standards documentation. Of course certifying conformance to a standard is going to have a cost. But publishing documentation that has already been written is effectively free.

[deleted]

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#62

Post by [deleted] »

lars_francke wrote: post #18
happytoexplain wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the benefits of charging for your work are mysterious. It's reasonable to believe that certain works should not be behind paywalls, but not understanding is kind of a confusing stance.

As someone working in standardization: I don't know any standardization organization where the people doing the actual work of writing standards are paid for their work. I certainly am not. In the organizations I know - including ISO - the money is basically exclusively spent on "overhead".

[deleted]

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#63

Post by defgeneric »

kyrra wrote: post #42
geerlingguy wrote: post #2

I don't understand why any standards body would consider not doing this as a default.

Construction codes are still pay walled. NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod... IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024 And there are many others. (I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you think about who needs to have access to the correct and current building code or electric code or whatever for regular reference, it's really your lawyer, plumber, electrician, architect, builder, etc. and in that context $170 or $130 isn't a bad deal.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#64

Post by kyrra »

defgeneric wrote: post #63
kyrra wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Construction codes are still pay walled. NEC (electric) is $170: https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-70-national-electrical-cod... IPC (plumbing) is $130: https://webstore.ansi.org/standards/icc/iccipc2024 And there are many others. (I will say the YC company https://up.codes/ makes these much more accessible, and deals with local variants to these regulations)

A justification for this would be: states choose these providers to accurately present building codes (keeping up with the right versions/revisions is a lot of work, etc) because there's risk in simply publishing the PDFs and leaving it to basically anyone to curate. But the providers (like ICC) also tend to lock these deals in with state laws (not sure if they lobby for it, but I would imagine they do). When you thi…

It also locks up things for homeowners that want to DIY a solution fixing a house. Obviously people fix things without looking at the codes (and there are plenty of horror stories out there), but if we opened up house codes for people to actually look at and refer to, homeowners could potentially better find how to do things properly, especially with AI.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#65

Post by [deleted] »

tyre wrote: post #47
lambdaone wrote: post #9

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid. It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal. This will only increase innovation.

[deleted]

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#66

Post by bitwize »

tyre wrote: post #47
lambdaone wrote: post #9

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid. It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal. This will only increase innovation.

APIs have not been ruled uncopyrightable. The Supreme Court found that Google's use of the Java API's was fair use; fair use is specifically a defense against infringement of a copyrighted work.

There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.

But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#67

Post by userbinator »

tyre wrote: post #47
lambdaone wrote: post #9

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid. It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal. This will only increase innovation.

We need a SciHub for standards docs

LibGen?

Re: SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible

#70

Post by tyre »

bitwize wrote: post #66
tyre wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal. This will only increase innovation.

APIs have not been ruled uncopyrightable. The Supreme Court found that Google's use of the Java API's was fair use; fair use is specifically a defense against infringement of a copyrighted work. There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google . APIs are specific…

You're right, fair use was the ruling. Thank you for the correction. In that case, would the implementation of a standard qualify? Feels like it would?
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