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by Old_Thrashbarg·7y ago·view on hn ↗
Right, following the fire laws when doing any work at home is not just a good idea, but required for safety of you and others in your vicinity.

You can be charged criminally for not following these laws that are behind paywalls.

In the ASTM v Public.Resource.Org case, I believe you are right, PRO agreed to voluntarily remove the laws while the case goes on. But that case has been going on since 2013 (https://ia801306.us.archive.org/33/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.16...). I suspect the law publishers are quite happy to have it drag on for another decade. The NFPA (publisher of NEC) makes over $80M a year, and the CEO is very well paid.

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A worrying alternative outcome could be that codes are copyrighted, posting them is copyright infringement, but that such non-public codes do not carry the force of law.

I obviously hope this doesn't happen, but it would be a logically consistent outcome. This would then "shatter" the argument into many impractical state-level lawsuits over judgment calls where an AHJ declared something unsafe because it didn't follow the letter of the code (even though it's not actually law), and non-code-buying individuals would each be left fighting uphill battles to prove their work was safe - effectively the shape of the Meyer reference I posted above.