Germany threatens to jail Carl Malamud for making the law available for free

Much of the culture clash you're seeing between comments from Europeans and Americans in this thread comes down to the difference in how the funding for public institutions is managed when it comes to copyrighted works.

In the US it's federal law that any work the government produces be placed in the public domain, no questions asked. So e.g. when the USGS produces a map it's fully funded by the government and placed in the public domain.

In Europe it's common for public (and pseudo-public, like the DIN) institutions to have a hybrid funding model, they're partially funded by taxpayers, but are expected to collect a nominal fee from the public or industry that expects to directly use some of their work.

Both models have their advantaged and disadvantages. One obvious one over in Europe is that if you partially depend on direct public funding you're more likely to actively serve the public, whereas in the US institutions would me more likely to gravitate towards serving the government itself, since it's only the government they depend on for funding.

Another aspect is that hypothetically it costs around the same thing to produce a map in Europe and America, but in Europe the general population will be taxed less for it, but people who directly use it (and buy it) will disproportionally pay for it.

Much of this is changing over in Europe, e.g. the National Land Survey of Iceland now gives out its map data under a free license, because indirect value to society of having freely available maps was judged greater than the sum of the nominal fee they previously charged for a license to use those maps.

This gets especially hairy in cases like these where some of this data being charged for is referenced directly or indirectly by law.

In the Reykjavík area in Iceland you can't do significant construction work without spending a relatively trivial sum to buy a ridiculously accurate map from the city (I think it's accurate down to 1-2 millimeters) showing where all the pipes and electrical cabling is installed. The surveying effort is mostly funded by private construction companies.

Would it be better if the average citizen just paid more in taxes and that map was made freely available, is some private citizen who isn't going to build a whole road but just do some significant yard work being overcharged because he has to legally comply with proprietary information?

I don't know, but the trade-offs involved aren't very clear in my mind.

The original assertion was (basically): "Just because you make something part of the law, doesn't make it free".

Note it was not even an assertion made about german law, but the law in general. There was no support for this statement offered, just a bare assertion that this was true.

I pointed out this was not true in the US, and probably not true in plenty of places. I specifically asked if there was any caselaw to support the assertion.

The response, rather than to offer support for the bare assertion, was to point out i cited the US. Which was kind of besides the point.

So I went to the trouble of looking up german copyright law, and posting what it says about it. At that point, I felt like I was essentially doing the work of the parent for them, and pointed out again that maybe they'd like to support their still bare assertion about the law.

So yes, there was something to support, and at least as of this writing, it's still not supported.

Their stance is that the other side's distinction is merely in their choice of words, but the facts of the situation are such that the standard plays the same role as a law would, and as such choosing to call it a "standard" rather than a "law" only serves to confuse people, not to describe the actual situation, and so they instead choose words that accurately and clearly describe things as they are from their perspective.