Then the government has to pay -- with tax money -- to produce it. And the standards organization will not pay for the whole project out of its own pocket, unless it's very wealthy.
Somebody has to pay for it, Bob. Who do you think that should be, the users or the taxpayers?
ge
The problem is that for some people here, the reasons are NOT obvious. But you can bet that if someone was ripping off their work product, they'd be all up in arms.
I know that my municipality has well stated (if somewhat excessive) fees for copies of any documents.
Can you imagine what it would be like if each municipality had to develop its own codes? The word "clusterfuck" comes to mind.
How do you explain ICC (the code group, not the USG agency) who writes the model building codes for many states but then those codes get published as black letter law and are freely available on their web site in a usable format. It is not like the arcane format on NFPA that does not really have any usability features.
Because it is THEIR property. YOU don't get to decide whether there's a difference between reading it online or downloading it. THEY do. So does copyright law.
There are reasons why NFPA would want to keep control over the printing and distribution of their materials.
Here's a couple of scenarios in which their lawyers would be very much interested: Suppose that this rogue PDF file is out there and, for some reason, it has be come corrupted. Perhaps some words got dropped, perhaps some numbers got changed, perhaps some troublemaker changed some stuff. Now imagine that someone built to this bogus code and...
1) Failed inspection and had to do a lot of rework and was very pissed at NFPA for allowing this to happen 2) Burned the house down with loss of life.Do you really want to trust your lifer or, perhaps your customer's life to a document you downloaded from piratebay?
Is there a difference?
Dan
Great, Bob. Try using Wikipedia as a defense against an infringement suit and see how far that gets you in court.
The "users" are the tradesmen who use it in their work. The taxpayers are the rest of us.
Raging socialism, once again. d8-)
Well, I read the case, annotations, commentary and footnotes. It was a 5th Circuit Court of Appeals case heard in 2002 and it reversed an appellate court ruling.
I follow their reasoning, but I liked the dissenting opinion much better. d8-)
Codes apply to homeowners too. Let's break for a story. Not because it's too relevant, but just because. A neighbor across the alley lit his garage up using gasoline to clean his motorcycle. Don't know all the details, but the fire took out my electric service legs and blistered the big doors on both my garages. The city (Chicago) required I get a new service with outside meter. Okay, made sense, but I wasn't exactly flush. And I'm now connected to inspectors. On their list. First electric contractor I had out for an estimate wanted about $1000 to do the meter and leg hookup. Told him I would call him. Let's call him McCoy. (Estimated numbers just to show relative cost. I don't remember exact numbers, and don't even remember what we did for power. Probably ComEd hooked it up without a meter, but that's dim.)
Second guy came out the same day, and said $500. Even putting price aside, I liked him better. Told him I would call him, but he probably had the job. I called the first guy , McCoy, and told him I was getting the job done at half his price. He was surprised and asked who. I told him Fifth Avenue Electric. FAE for short. He hit the roof, and told me they weren't licensed, they buy their permits, just call the city inspection office, blah, blah. Anyway, I bought it. Last thing I want is unlicensed work, and inspectors on my ass. So I told McCoy to come out and finalize the deal.
I called the "unlicensed" guy back and told him that I was told his company wasn't licensed, and I couldn't go with him. He told me any work he did would be legal, but I told him I didn't want to take any chances. He didn't press me. I was actually a little disappointed in him, but that was because I didn't know "the system."
Now in the meantime I had a visit from the city inspector. He walked through the basement and told me fix this and fix that. A ceiling light over the laundry tub needed a porcelain fixture, and a junction box needed a cover. He looked at me and pointedly said, "I'm not going upstairs." That made me happy, and I asked him to repeat it. My house was a 2-flat, built in the 1920's, with original electrics. Imagine the code violations.
So McCoy comes riding in on a new Honda Gold Wing to do a contract. I won't get into this except to say I'm a Harley guy. Not that I ride, but that's what I would ride. First thing McCoy wants to do is inspect the entire house to see what has to be done. I tell him I talked to the inspector and he won't go past the basement. McCoy made a mistake and wanted to argue about that. "My reputation" bullshit. And he wouldn't back down, and stuck to that line. Instead of getting the service job and minor fixes, he pissed me off so badly I almost hit him. I basically ran him back to his bike. I was so pissed I went right to the phone and called FAE. Just told him to come out and do the job. Mostly to get back at that asshole McCoy, since I still had concerns about permitting, but it worked out anyway.
When FAE came out first thing he said was "I really thought I lost you. What happened?" I told him about my run-in with McCoy. Anyway, we became friendly fast, and he told me the city pulled his company's license because they wouldn't kick back to inspectors. His dad owned the company, was a long time electric contractor and would never swing that way. This guy was my age, about 30 then, and had 10 brothers! I met about 5 of them as they worked on my place. He explained that they had so many friends in the business to pull permits for them that it hardly slowed them down. And it was all legal, so no worry about the inspector. You don't have to be licensed to do the work, just to pull the permit. Think about that. He told me I really needed some more circuits, switches and outlets upstairs and he would run them for 25 bucks each if I did the re-plastering. I told him I was short on money, and he said don't worry, pay me when you can. Owed him about $500 when he was done, paid him in a couple months. No problem with the inspector, and he didn't go upstairs.
A few months later FAE dropped by to return some camping/outdoors books he had borrowed from me and told me the whole story. His dad was wearing a wire for the feds while he and his brothers worked on my house. Mike Royko wrote a column about his dad wearing the wire. I read that column once, on the internet I think, but can't find it now. 1978. Feds indicted one third of the city electrical inspectors. Big scandal. Mostly for taking bribes to overlook violations I think, but taking kickbacks from electrical contractors was part of the mix. That's my maybe boring story about codes, inspectors and electricians. I like it anyway.
I meant I pay the inspector's salaries. They have a book they can use to hammer me with, no different than law.
snip
Since you can get free access to it according to law, it's no big deal. I didn't know that. That almost takes care of my "philosophical" objections. I take your point about who pays, and what's the most efficient way of getting code created in one place. I'm not foaming at the mouth about this. Ed, if I wanted the entire NEC I would just pay the 60-70 bucks for it. What got me going on this is I do my own plumbing and simple electrical work. I always want to follow code. You made me look harder on my town's website. The plumbing code for my town is the Illinois Plumbing Code, 2004 Edition (with local amendments.) I can order that for 40 bucks. From the Illinois Department of Public Health! Electrical is Chicago Electrical Code, 2007 edition with local amendments. That's on-line. Clumsy to use, but it's there. I also found the amendments to those two on the town website with a little digging. Here's a plumbing amendment that's relevant to a discussion of floor drains here a while back,
"890.1370a). Add a new subparagraph 6): In addition to the above, at least one vented floor drain is required in the vicinity of all washing machines, furnaces, hot water heaters, boilers, reduced pressure backflow preventers, and water meters."
Another plumbing amendment is the addition of some chapters of the
2003 International Plumbing Code. That book has to be bought. HVAC codes are covered by International Mechanical Code, 2003. That one has to be bought.For the sake of comparison I looked at how Ohio villages do it. The examples I saw all referenced the Ohio Building Code, with no amendments. That's easy, just look up the Ohio code. But the Ohio code essentially says read the 2006 International Building Code. Looks like that has to be bought. Anyway, my head is spinning, but now I know how to find codes, whether they're free or not. The electrical code is all online, so I don't even care about the NEC. But after wading through some of the code, I might just ask the guy at Home Depot what he thinks. Nah. I'll just ask here. If I was in a trade, I'd just buy the books, like I did many times for doing my IT work.
--Vic
So is the code available on the web site, and what is the web site if it is available for reading???
Let's make sure we're clear on this. I live in Morton Grove, Il. The electrical code for Morton Grove is the Chicago Electric code. It's the Chicago electric code that is online. Amendments that apply to Morton Grove are on the Morton Grove website.
Just Electric. Morton Grove codes for plumbing, HVAC, etc aren't available online. They refer you other code books, but do have amendments that apply to Morton Grove.
This is the website for Chicago codes. You have to hit "more at the bottom to get the electric chapters. Division 27. It ain't as pretty as a book. And I have no idea how it compares to NEC. Do me a favor will you? If you actually read through the codes and find a part that says "Refer to NEC 2011," keep it yourself, ok?
--Vic
I served time and gladly for 8 or 9 years as an active member of a standards group multiple committees and the group was under EIA. We met to make standards and get tasks to do for the next meeting - presenting results and suggesting changes to the infant standard. The various member companies paid rather large sums to be active members. They also had specs early on in the design - often changing after every meeting - often only the input and output pins with the core a dummy until the combinatorial logic was sorted out by groups.
I served on memory (e.g. DDR DDR I, DDR II) DIMM (pc modules) SoDim (laptops) and custom modules, motherboards and the I/O spec groups.
The members paid for the joint development, standards got to get us to make the standard and then they maintain them.
One standard that enjoyed a long changing life was USB. Not only levels but physical shape and protocol as well. Members could call a special meeting to start off a spec. Often a large company would have a spec and then work to make it a standard.
Mart>> Ed Huntress wrote:
My idea of users is a bit broader. If you live in a house with electricity, you are an indirect user of the NEC.
Dan
Thanks for that bit of information.
My main objection to the NEC is that it is poorly organized. I expect that is intentional to make following the code to be hard and not easily done by homeowners. In Washington State the courts found that homeowners can work on their own property without having a license. The work still has to meet all the requirements. And the building departments of cities and counties will help owners understand what is required.
Dan
Thanks for that bit of information.
There is another book put out that explains what the code says. Guess that is one way of getting around the 'free' code book.
Maybe your ISP is blocking it. I know Giganews has it because I clicked the link in the OPs note and went right to it in Agent.
I looked and there were a bunch of old NSA documents that were more interesting to me. The ones on the German Enigma machine are pretty cool. (declassified public domain stuff Ed)
Well, I didn't find it boring. That kind of story makes my blood boil, but I've lived with them all my life. The foundation and basement of my parent's house was built by the son of Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante. ( he was a high school friend of mine and he built a fine basement).
Based on the court case that was brought up here on Sunday, it's all moot, anyway. It's Katie Bar the Doors -- copyrights are broken once a code is incorporated into law.
I don't like it, but that's the way it is.
I read that court case (5th Circuit) and I can see their reasoning for it. As a practical matter, the NFPA's membership has an interest in getting it accepted and widely used. So there is an interest there that, the court says, overcomes any problems with who is paying whom.
I just watch out for the underlying principle. For most of my life, copyright has been an important issue in my work. I just don't like the idea that people should get all of that work for free.
This time, I'll reverse myself on the issue for this particular set of circumstances. It's not like a private, individual writer having his work taken away.
BTW, my library has a good set of code books and I've used them for over 30 years. They're in the reference section so you can't take them out, but it works for me. If I were working on my plumbing or electrical night and day, like I did 30 years ago, I might feel differently.
I tossed this one out to see the reactions. I worked for MITRE, which is structured as a private company doing public-interest consulting funded by federal contracts, another approach to expert technical assistance not subject to bureaucratic and political overhead.
I took the governmentese writing classes, though I wrote only manuals and circuit descriptions. The instructor mostly discussed the various administrative models from the rule-based formalism of a bank to the wild-west power struggles Harold Geneen encouraged at ITT.
We have never agreed on a single model for functions that combine private and public interest. We range from phone-pole monopolies for otherwise private utilities through complete government control (NASA), and some like water works may flop back and forth. Fire departments were once private companies. In the case of the NEC volunteers create standards that become law, a de facto practical compromise between private special interest and elected authority.
jsw
i found it. i had to scroll down through the list, first picking alt, then binaries, etc. It would not search out by typing it in. Seems i've had this issue before with TB.
didn't find any NEC on the group, however. As a matter of fact, there was only ONE post in the whole group.
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