"rangerssuck" wrote in message
...
On Apr 24, 1:06 pm, Bob Engelhardt wrote:
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Jim Wilkins" wrote in message
I wonder what He would think of copyrighting the rules we have to
follow and charging to see them. If they have legal authority they
should be public domain.

Great. Now, who puts them together and writes them down? And who pays
those
people? The federal government?

...

Here's an interesting quote from the Wikipedia article on the NEC:
"In the United States, statutory law cannot be copyrighted and is freely
accessible and copyable by anyone.[1] When a standards organization
develops a new coding model and it is not yet accepted by any
jurisdiction as law, it is still the private property of the standards
organization ... Once the coding model has been accepted as law, it
loses copyright protection and may be freely obtained at no cost."

Bob

Great, Bob. Try using Wikipedia as a defense against an infringement
suit and see how far that gets you in court.

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-)

--
Ed Huntress