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.

Martin IEEE, JEDEC former spec member. And yes specs are down loadable.

On 4/24/2011 12:32 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Bob wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Jim 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

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?