I have access to all of the BS codes and more from the online technica indices at work. Our company pays the fees and anyone can access any o them at any time. Tis great.
However, when downloading or printing them out, they have the compan name, the date and the name of the guy who downloaded it plastered o every page down the side.
Will be interesting to see if this is the case with the guy's codes o ebay! If so, the BSI will have no probs tracking the culprit down!
-- Cordless Crazy
However you want to dress it up, your aim is to steal BSI's intellectual property.
Colin Bignell
I have no problem with the concept of intellectual property. It the combination of a certain set of intellectual property also being the law.
I'm not even arguing that the docs should be free - I'm just saying that they should be affordable to most people who have an interest in them. If CORGI said that it was mandatory to have access to these documents at the price they retail at then most professionals would simply (and very reluctantly) shell out and the whole matter would be yet another overhead to be amortised by the clients. Making the correct information available to everyone won't automatically make things safer but might just help and demystifying the information has other benefits.
There are gas fitting texts around (eg. CORGI, Viper and various Training/Assessment centres) the trouble is that they contain summaries of what the writer thought was important.
I strongly suspect that the BG fitter in the other thread did not have his own copy of BS 5440-1:2000 although it is possible that he may just have had Essential Gas Safety (from CORGI) with him.
That depends on how it is encrypted.
-- JJ
It does not matter really, it needs decripting prior to display, you knobble it then. (some of the PDF writer software development component sets are quite handy for this sort of stuff, since you can render objects one at a time and work out which ones to not bother rendering! ;-)
As I, and also others, pay for these products, I assume my money pays for the companies to create these standards. As such, I think that they should be in the public domain. After all, it is in the company's interest to make sure that the product I buy still complies to the standard.
Dave
The first point of contact with the HSE at school is the HSE designated teacher/teaching assistant. I was asked if the ladders complied. (I doubt very much they do and I am more that capable of examining ladders, both wooden and aluminium, for integrity. Its just that I have no county qualifications to do so.) I told the HSE at school that she would have to provide me with any copies of HSE regs that she wanted me to work to. That was more that 6 months ago and I have had no further contact on the matter.
On another subject...
If you work at a school as 'site supervisor' (the new name for caretaker,) you will find yourself in a lone worker environment. When I asked the head teacher about the lone working policy, she said that she would look into it. I told her not to bother, as it would only open up another can of worms (the first being the BSI ladder problem)
Just why does modern law take out of our control so many matters? Sorry to answer my own question. It must be this control freak government.
No, but they collect it through what I purchase though ;-)
Dave
Yes but you've got to pay for the software ;-)
(Cue: anyone aware of any OSS that does such manipulations?)
Or more likely tracking down the mug whose Athens account the eBayer has cracked.
[Update after seeing Ed's copy.]
OK, that'll be a bit harder since they've stripped the watermark off the edges of the pages (by cropping the pages). They've also lost the document structure in the process. Ed's/eBay version: http://82.21.72.246/~john/BS/5440-ES.jpg Pukka BS version: http://82.21.72.246/~john/BS/5440-RC.jpgI note the pirate version's document properties says PDF producer "iText
1.53 by lowagie.com" which is an OSS PDF tool in Java. I haven't read & understood enough to know if this can be used to do the cropping, but if they've actually imported it and done some fancy footwork to have it hide the watermark on the displayed resultant PDF I suspect the encrypted watermark - with details of original licensee - may still be embedded in the document. It would be fun to know :-)
You beat me to it! ;-)
iText is a pretty decent library, we use it in one of our commercial applications.
It can do pretty much anything you can do in the full blown version of agrobat, and a whole lot more.
Theres lots of freeware pdf manuipulation, conversion, screen capture etc software about. Between them you can do pretty much anything with pdf. The thing with freeware on non standard or design type tasks is you often need to use a few different apps together to get there.
NT
The way its set up is a recipe for abuse. Does the govt want the public to be abused by widespread spurious extraction of thousands of pounds by con artists? Gas testing has become a corrupted area.
Landlord /tenant issues is another area where the govt is squarely backing criminal tenants.
NT
It is an absolute and outrageous rip off that both BS and ISO standards are not free. All Acts of Parliament, Statutory Instruments, EU Directives that drive the production of BS and ISO standards are free to download - but often charged for if bought as a hard publication. Likewise all Maritime and Coastguard Agency notices and regulatory documents and the Boat Safety Scheme document are also free online. Even the reports of VAT Tribunals are now free off the internet site - there used to be a nominal charge to cover photocopying and postage. Just to get all the ISO standards for compliance with the Recreational Craft Directive is around =A3500. Luckily, they are also in my library on DVDs - but due to the cost my library - large main library in Oxford
- is stopping its annual subscription to BS/ISO. At every mouse click there is a copyright and copying warning!!! CORGI is also a rip off and does not prevent the con installers. Likewise Part P and L is going the same way.
But if the Government chooses to use a BSI doc as the basis of a regulation then it has in effect sub-contracted the detailed drafting of the law. That may be more effective and efficient than civil servants doing the work in-house. So let the government pay for the work by purchase a license to make the relevant parts of the standard freely available.
I agree. Giving regulations etc the force of law but not allowing free and easy access to them is beyond common sense. It's just what happens when profit making bodies are allowed to become involved in such things.
I realise that, just get used to the idea of changing hosting companies regularly and getting threatening letters from solicitors.
That's why they are available in local libraries.
But these bodies are not profit-making. They are non-profit bodies that must balance the books between what it costs to produce the standards, and how many they are likely to sell, without making a profit, but equally, without falling into the red.
I'm sure if you were to produce a proper standard (do all the research, organise the committees and experts, the design, editing, etc) and allow it to be distributed free (i.e. you don't attempt to recover these costs), the government would have no problem using it in future legislation.
-- JJ
*Some* libraries, at the budgetary whim of the librarian.
Owain
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