> Mandated ISO standards in 1947 was absurd secret law too. Democracy is not that new of a concept.
In the 1940s, if you wanted to read legislation, there was no downloading it for free off the Internet – either you purchased a printed copy, or found a library that held it – and you may have had to travel some distance to do so, there was no guarantee that your neighbourhood public library did. Most people viewed charging for printed copies of legislation as acceptable, given that it cost money to print them. So, in that sense, legally mandated ISO standards weren't fundamentally different from laws in general. Prior to the 1990s, when the Internet began to change people's expectations, the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted, and few would have labelled that situation as anti-democratic or as "absurd secret law".
> It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.
In the 1940s, rather than calling the ISO secretariat in Switzerland directly, you would have called your national standards body, who acted as a reseller. Buying standards then was only harder than today in the sense that buying anything back then was harder than today.
> the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted
Was the idea that everyone is entitled to a copy of all legislation at cost widely accepted? Or did most people believe the the publisher (or the legislature?) should overcharge them and stand to make a profit off it?
I don't know how much "at cost" would be for ISO, but something tells me it wouldn't be an identical 158 CHF for both PDF and paper.
> Neither. Access to legislation must be possible at no cost for everybody. Otherwise you can't expect people to follow it.
In the real world, most people follow legislation without ever reading it. People build a rough mental model, based on media sources, government websites, common sense, etc, which divides acts into "probably illegal", "probably legal", and "grey area". If they stick to the "probably legal", they are unlikely to have any legal problems. If they are seriously considering venturing into the "probably illegal" or "grey area" zones, a wise person hires a lawyer and gets some professional legal advice first. The majority of the population has no hope of ever understanding legislation – something people on this website tend to forget, because most people on this website are significantly more intelligent and better educated than the average person is. And even those of us who aren't intimidated by legislation and case law and law textbooks, in the way that the average person is, ought to remember the old adage "A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client"–if you don't have the formal training and real-world experience of an actual lawyer, it is easy to make a costly mistake–e.g reading some law literally, and unfortunately you never found the case law which interprets it to mean something quite different from what it literally says. Keep the amateur lawyering as a hobby, maybe some real world situations where the cost of being wrong is low (such as challenging a parking ticket), and rely on a professional for anything actually important.
> Of course, that doesn't entitle you to a copy, making it available at libraries is already enough.
Well, ISO standards are freely available at some libraries. Generally national libraries, major public research libraries, university libraries (some of which are open to general public, others restrict admission to staff/students/etc.) Your local public library probably doesn't have any copies of ISO standards–mine doesn't. But, my local public library doesn't seem to have copies of legislation and case law either – my local public library has very little in the way of serious/professional/academic legal texts, just some very introductory stuff aimed at the general reader.
I honestly don't think the average person thought much about the cost of buying legislation. Even today, I think the average person feels intimidated by legislation and doesn't want to read it even if it is all freely available.
As far as the official version of federal/national legislation goes – in 1947, in both the US and the UK, that was sold by a government agency overall at cost or even at a loss. ("Overall at cost" meaning, they might sometimes have made a profit on an individual print run, but profits they made on some print runs were balanced by losses on others, so they didn't make a profit overall.)
However, most lawyers preferred to use private editions published by for-profit publishers, which added copyrighted notes providing cross-references to other relevant legislation, important court decisions, etc. So the "raw" version of the legislation was available at-cost but the version most lawyers actually used was not. And that remains true today – most lawyers don't rely on the freely available versions on the web, they use expensive commercial subscription services (Westlaw, LexisNexis, etc) which add lots of very useful privately copyrighted notes–and you really need the information in those notes to properly interpret the law, because if you don't have cross-references to other legislation and case law, you won't know what it really means in practice–and although you could probably reconstruct those notes yourself to some extent (such as by searching free case law databases for references to a certain section of legislation), doing so is laborious and likely to be error-prone (it is easy to miss something important because you didn't use the exactly right search term, etc). So even now, access to the law is not as "free" as many think it is.
> I don't know how much "at cost" would be for ISO, but something tells me it wouldn't be an identical 158 CHF for both PDF and paper.
I think from ISO's viewpoint, it is "at cost", because they are not just including the cost of printing or hosting the download, but also the administrative and editorial costs of producing the underlying standard. ISO is a not-for-profit body and any profit it makes is reinvested into the standard development process. By contrast, when you buy a copy of an Act/Statute from the government print office, you are not paying for the actual running costs of the Congress/Parliament/etc which produced the legislation – that is paid for through taxation – whereas ISO being a private body can't levy taxes.
That's not to say that ISO has to use their current model. They could make all their standards freely available and try to recover the editorial/administrative costs through some other mechanism – charging membership fees to corporations, government grants, etc. However, while those methods are feasible – other standard bodies use them – I think ISO would respond that they would make ISO more dependent upon and more beholden to corporate and government interests than they currently are. I suppose the critical response to that is that ISO already is quite beholden to corporate and government interests, and it is hard to see how it could get any more beholden, but ISO would not agree with that.
Very good summary. While it is true that ISO is stuck in time, at the same time its model weren't out-of-place when it was implemented, similar to how copyright laws now seems weird or plain wrong to many here while a century back (outside US, because theirs was weirder) it was widely accepted to compensate corporations who have took their time to record and stamp those phonographs.
In the 1940s, if you wanted to read legislation, there was no downloading it for free off the Internet – either you purchased a printed copy, or found a library that held it – and you may have had to travel some distance to do so, there was no guarantee that your neighbourhood public library did. Most people viewed charging for printed copies of legislation as acceptable, given that it cost money to print them. So, in that sense, legally mandated ISO standards weren't fundamentally different from laws in general. Prior to the 1990s, when the Internet began to change people's expectations, the idea that everyone was entitled to a free personal copy of all legislation was not widely accepted, and few would have labelled that situation as anti-democratic or as "absurd secret law".
> It was not just a matter of getting in a phone and calling the ISO customer center.
In the 1940s, rather than calling the ISO secretariat in Switzerland directly, you would have called your national standards body, who acted as a reseller. Buying standards then was only harder than today in the sense that buying anything back then was harder than today.